Infection and Inflammation Services

We assist clients with study design, experiment execution, data acquisition, analysis and statistics for in vivo infection and inflammation studies.

What we do

Infectious and inflammatory diseases remain major contributors to morbidity and mortality worldwide. Several immune-mediated diseases in mice mimic disease pathogenesis in humans thereby making mice useful in basic research as well as translational research to evaluate the impact of mutations in vivo.

While the mouse is a valuable pre-clinical model, its usefulness depends on rigorous experimental design, execution, data analysis and statistics. Members of the Infection and Inflammation Core have over 25 years of experience developing and specializing in the use of infectious, autoimmune and inflammatory disease mouse models relevant to human diseases.

We provide expertise, state-of-the-art infrastructure and services to enable dissection of genetics and complex biological and immunological pathways underlying the host response to pathogens and inflammation.

Our well-established mouse models allow researchers to:

• Test and characterize human candidate genes and the impact of pathogenic mutations on physiological and immune function in mice

Human IRF8 variants were associated with severe immunodeficiency and early disseminated infection by BCG vaccines in infants. Further studies in mice carrying the IRF8 variants allowed for better understanding of the role of IRF8 in transcription, monocyte and dendritic cell development, and antimycobacterial immunity. Hambleton et al., NEJM (2011)

• Investigate potential pleiotropic effects of specific genetic risk loci

A loss-of-function mutation in Usp15 was identified that protected mice from experimental cerebral malaria induced by Plasmodium berghei infection. Interestingly, the mutation in Usp15 was further shown to protect from neuroinflammation and Experimental Autoimmune Encephalomyelitis as a model of multiple sclerosis. These findings reveal that there is significant overlap between pathways regulating host defense response and inflammation. Torre et al., Nature Immunology (2017)

• Use mouse models of human infectious and inflammatory diseases to identify and test novel drug therapies

Cysteamine treatment was shown to improve anti-plasmodial activity towards blood-stage and cerebral malaria when administered in combination with artermisinin in mice. Clinical treatment with Cysteamine could improve outcomes and decrease mortality in cerebral malaria patients, as well as prevent or delay onset of resistance to artemisinins. Moradin et al., Malaria Journal (2016)

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Infectious Disease Models

Our infectious disease models include a wide range of bacterial, viral, parasitic and fungal pathogens to evaluate host-pathogen interaction.

Viral pathogens

Bacterial pathogens

Parasitic pathogens

Fungal pathogens

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Autoimmune and Inflammatory Disease Models

Animal models can be tailored to meet study design. We also welcome the opportunity to develop new mouse models of infectious and inflammatory diseases.

Please contact us for more information, if you have any questions or to discuss your study requirements.

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Services Overview

• Semi-quantitative scoring
• Body weight analysis
• Enumeration of pathogen burden from target tissues
• Time point studies
• Survival analysis
• Collection of blood and/or solid organs for downstream histopathology lesion scoring, flow cytometry, molecular and biochemical analysis.

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Location

McGill University Research Centre on Complex Traits
Infection & Inflammation Core
3649 Promenade Sir William Osler
Montreal, Quebec
Canada H3G 0B1

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