Megan Sykes - April 8, 2020

Megan Sykes, MD, "Human immune system mouse models ready for adaptation to COVID-19 research"

Dr. Sykes is working to adapt human immune system mouse models for the study of major questions in COVID-19 research. Animal modeling of COVID-19 is essential to answering many questions in this disease, however, many animal models either do not have immune systems that closely mimic humans or are difficult to scale up to appropriate numbers for testing. Therefore, immunodeficient mice that can be reconstituted with human immune systems may provide a useful tool that circumvents some of these challenges. To achieve this goal, the Sykes lab is creating multiple mouse models that include physiologic distributions of ACE2, inclusion of human lung tissue, improved lymphoid tissue structure and vaccination responses, and transgenic expression of HLA-A2. Some of these mouse models are in production to be fully reconstituted and some are currently available to be utilized to test multiple aspects of SARS-CoV-2 infection.

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