About this Research Topic
Animal model is pivotal for unravelling the pathogenesis of infectious diseases, especially the complex of host-pathogen interactions. The well-designed animal model can provide a sound basis to support the development of vaccine and novel therapies. The pathogenic microbes (e.g. HIV, HBV, etc.) have caused severe infectious diseases, even the newly identified viruses (e.g. Coronaviruses, Flavivirus, Influenza viruses, etc.) have posed a massive impact on public health globally. Animal model development is imperative to determine the relationship of the host to a novel pathogen. In particular, animal models have been applied to evaluate the safety and efficacy of potential therapeutics, so that reduce the testing in humans with potentially dangerous or ineffective therapies. Therefore, the experimental animal study can fill the critical gap of knowledge in the biological information matrix for infectious diseases by deciphering the etiology of infectious diseases, revealing the dynamics of immune responses in the host and providing information on intervention strategies with drugs and vaccine at a preclinical level.
This Research Topic will focus on how to generate animal models of emerging and critical infectious diseases, serving as the fundamental study in the field of infectious disease researches. Also, cutting-edged application of novel technical tools that applied for establishing an animal model and host-pathogen interactions, especially on the related immunology, will be discussed as well.
This Research Topic welcomes submissions of Original Research, Reviews related to subtopics including but not limited to the following:
• Establishing and optimizing infectious animal models with different pathogenic microbes for different study purposes; applying cutting-edge techniques, e.g. novel gene-editing tools, humanized animals strategies etc. to generate animal models.
• Comparison studies on the infectious animal models between different animals, different backgrounds (genetic backgrounds, genders, ages, fundamental situations etc. ) and different methods (inoculation routes, dosages, etc.).
• Application of the animal models to the immunology studies on emerging infectious diseases: the innate and adaptive immune responses to emerging microbes; the possible immunopathological mechanism in some specific cases (e.g. antibody-dependent enhancement of the disease, ADE); cutting-edged techniques used for immunological studies.
• Application of the animal models to the development of prophylactic and therapeutic immune measures: evaluation of novel vaccines, antibody-based drugs, immunomodulation drugs (small molecules, cytokines etc.), and adoptive immunocyte therapies etc.
This Research Topic will focus on how to generate animal models of emerging and critical infectious diseases, serving as the fundamental study in the field of infectious disease researches. Also, cutting-edged application of novel technical tools that applied for establishing an animal model and host-pathogen interactions, especially on the related immunology, will be discussed as well.
This Research Topic welcomes submissions of Original Research, Reviews related to subtopics including but not limited to the following:
• Establishing and optimizing infectious animal models with different pathogenic microbes for different study purposes; applying cutting-edge techniques, e.g. novel gene-editing tools, humanized animals strategies etc. to generate animal models.
• Comparison studies on the infectious animal models between different animals, different backgrounds (genetic backgrounds, genders, ages, fundamental situations etc. ) and different methods (inoculation routes, dosages, etc.).
• Application of the animal models to the immunology studies on emerging infectious diseases: the innate and adaptive immune responses to emerging microbes; the possible immunopathological mechanism in some specific cases (e.g. antibody-dependent enhancement of the disease, ADE); cutting-edged techniques used for immunological studies.
• Application of the animal models to the development of prophylactic and therapeutic immune measures: evaluation of novel vaccines, antibody-based drugs, immunomodulation drugs (small molecules, cytokines etc.), and adoptive immunocyte therapies etc.
Keywords: pathogenic microbes, infectious diseases, animal models, immunology
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
