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Feasibility of establishing a nude mouse model of thymoma-associated myasthenia gravis
Jun Zhang1, Yijie Yan1, Zhiyu Guan1
1Department of Thoracic Surgery, The Second Hospital of Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin, China.
Background:
The pathogenesis of thymoma-associated myasthenia gravis (TAMG) remains unclear, and one of the key problems is the lack of an appropriate animal model. The present study aimed to investigate the feasibility of establishing an animal model of TAMG.
Methods:
Patient thymoma tissue specimens were transplanted into the left renal subcapsules of BALB/c nude mice under sterile conditions. The content of T lymphocytes and subsets, as well as total complement, in the mouse peripheral blood was detected using flow cytometry and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) prior to and following transplantation. Furthermore, the tumor tissues were analyzed by immunohistochemistry (IHC).
Results:
Transplanted thymoma tissues survived in the mice with a success rate of 61%. Flow cytometry results indicated that the percentage of cluster of differentiation CD3+ and CD4+ T cells in the peripheral blood post-transplantation was significantly higher compared with pre-transplantation. By contrast, the percentage of CD8+ T cells and total complement cells was significantly reduced post-transplantation compared with pre-transplantation (P<0.05).
Conclusions:
This preliminary study demonstrates the feasibility of establishing an animal model for thymoma and myasthenia gravis (MG) pathogenesis research by transplanting human thymoma tissues into BALB/c nude mice. Nevertheless, several issues and challenges must be resolved and investigated in future research.
