Humanized Mice for Live-Attenuated Vaccine Research: From Unmet Potential to New Promises

Live-attenuated vaccines (LAV) represent one of the most important medical innovations in human history. In the past three centuries, LAV have saved hundreds of millions of lives, and will continue to do so for many decades to come. Interestingly, the most successful LAVs, such as the smallpox vaccine, the measles vaccine, and the yellow fever vaccine, have been isolated and/or developed in a purely empirical manner without any understanding of the immunological mechanisms they trigger. Today, the mechanisms governing potent LAV immunogenicity and long-term induced protective immunity continue to be elusive, and therefore hamper the rational design of innovative vaccine strategies. A serious roadblock to understanding LAV-induced immunity has been the lack of suitable and cost-effective animal models that can accurately mimic human immune responses. In the last two decades, human-immune system mice (HIS mice), i.e., mice engrafted with components of the human immune system, have been instrumental in investigating the life-cycle and immune responses to multiple human-tropic pathogens. However, their use in LAV research has remained limited. Here, we discuss the strong potential of LAVs as tools to enhance our understanding of human immunity and review the past, current and future contributions of HIS mice to this endeavor.