Today, JAX now maintains several nude strains from NIH. In 1975, The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) imported the Foxn1nu mutation from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on an outbred stock of mice. What nude mouse strains exist, and how do they differ? Taken together, these characteristics of the nude mice make them an excellent model for xenografting tumor cell lines, understanding mechanisms of tumor malignancy, and testing the impact of potential treatments (Price, 2001).

These phenotypes are useful as it allows a range of foreign cells or tissue to engraft into the mouse host. This also results in a lack of antibody production (Muqbil, Philip, & Mohammad, 2019 Wettersten et al., 2014). Thus, nude mice lack a proper thymus, T cell maturation, and may show small amounts of sparse, generally abnormal fur or whiskers that are structurally weak and break as they grow (Mecklenburg et al., 2004).īeing athymic, they do not produce mature T cells and exhibit a reduced number of circulating lymphocytes, as compared to wildtype or heterozygous controls. Due to their immuno-comprised phenotype, they have proven to be useful for xenografts, particularly in cancer research (Wettersten, Ganti, & Weiss, 2014 Szadvar, I et al., 2016). Nude mice are an invaluable tool in biomedical research and drug discovery. So if you have a colleague who’s using nude mice, or you are starting to use them yourself, here is some background information on these models and some tips on handling them. But even through the years, nude mice remain just as relevant today as they were then in a variety of therapeutic areas, including oncology and immunology. In the 50-plus years since the discovery of nude mice, the field has changed significantly due to the development of gene-targeting technology. This is a particular mouse strain that has a mostly “hairless” phenotype (Pantelouris 1968 Mecklenburg L et al., 2004). It was in the 1960s that the first publication specifically mentioned nude mice, also known as athymic mice.

Their relatively small size, and both genetic and physiological similarity to humans, make mice a model organism for human disease. The mouse is arguably the most widely used mammalian model in biomedical research.

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