Neurosensory diseases are difficult to model in mice because their symptoms are complex and diverse. The genetic causes identified are often lethal when transferred to a mouse.
The lack of animal models slows progress in understanding and treating the diseases. By strategically altering a protein-making molecule, a mouse was made to help understand nervous system diseases that impair feeling and cause paralysis of the arms and legs in humans.
Scientists have created a mouse to help understand human neuronal diseases that impair a patient's ability to feel and to move their arms and legs. By strategically altering a protein-making molecule, a mouse was made with symptoms similar to the nervous system diseases, Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) and hereditary motor neuropathy (HMN). In CMT and HMN, neurons that signal and maintain muscle cells become defective, which causes weakening and loss of muscle that is significant enough in some cases to lead to death. The symptoms become progressively worse over time and no effective treatments or cures exist for these diseases. Researchers came together from the University College London (UCL), the Medical Research Centre (MRC) Harwell, the University of Oxford, and the University of London in England, Vrije University in The Netherlands and Jackson Laboratories in the US to make a genetic change in mice that has been associated with CMT and HMN diseases in people.
Neurosensory diseases are difficult to model in mice because they involve symptoms that are complex and diverse. These diseases are passed from parents to their children but the genetic causes identified are often lethal when transferred to a mouse. The lack of animal models slows progress in understanding and treating the diseases.