Modelling Human EED and ASD: a Piglet Approach

Marie Lewis of the University of Reading in the United Kingdom will establish pig models of environmental enteric dysfunction (EED) and acute secretory diarrhea (ASD) to develop and test new therapeutic approaches. Rodents are commonly used to model human enteropathies, but their physiology is quite different and often therapies that work in rodents fail in humans. Pigs may be a more valuable disease model as their biology is more comparable to humans. Thus, to promote the clinical success of candidate therapies for EED and ASD, they will develop pig models of human enteropathies by abruptly weaning piglets, feeding them a defined diet, and infecting them with an enteric pathogen. Several weeks later, they will analyze nutrition and growth, the extent of gut dysfunction, and metabolic and gut microbial profiles to assess the value of the models and study the effects of these diseases. In the future, these models could be used to screen for new therapies for these and other gastrointestinal diseases.