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Finding a treatment for dengue has been a tough and long-drawn process—medicines that do well on animals and in the laboratory often fail when used on humans.
Researchers from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) may have found the solution: “humanised mice”, or mice that have been injected with human foetal liver cells from the second day they are born.
Based on a study conducted by SMART and published recently in the Journal of Virology, the injection will cause mice with a certain gene mutation to develop a human immune system. And when these mice are infected with the dengue virus, they will display human symptoms such as a low platelet count.
This makes them a better indicator of how humans will react to a certain vaccine, before it is tested on actual humans in a clinical trial.
Singapore is currently experiencing its worst dengue epidemic yet, with over 15,000 cases reported this year.
