Beyond Transgenics: Leveraging Humanized Mice for Disease Modeling and Therapeutics

Dear Colleagues,

Mice with humanized immune systems or specific human cell types offer unique opportunities to mimic human disease conditions in vivo and facilitate research without having to use larger animal models.

Humanized mice provide an unparalleled platform for studyi  ng infectious disease pathogenesis, cancer pathogenesis, immune responses, and the efficacy of potential treatments under conditions closely resembling human physiology. In the era of personalized and precision medicine, humanized mice represent a promising tool for evaluating individualized treatment responses and disease outcomes.

However, there is a growing need for comparative research articles that underscore the utility or improvements of humanized mice compared to transgenic rodents, and/or non-human primate models, as well as articles that highlight the latest generations of humanized mice and their capability to recapitulate the clinical features of human diseases.

In this Special Issue, we invite submissions of original research, reviews, and short communications focusing on cellular and molecular analyses of humanized mouse models across human diseases.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, functional genomics of disease, epigenomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, microbiome, systems biology, innovative methods to study human disease, novel techniques for genome editing in mice, software tools, and more.

Humanized mouse models include:

• Hematopoietic/immune system models;
• Cancer PDX models;
• Human tissue transplant models;
• Human gene transgenic models;
• Human embryonic stem cell models;
• Human organoid transplant models;
• Combinational humanized mouse models.

We look forward to your submissions to this Special Issue.

Dr. Sharilyn Almodovar
Dr. Michael W. Melkus
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Molecular Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. There is an Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal. For details about the APC please see here. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• humanized mouse
• cancer
• infectious disease
• cardiovascular disease
• respiratory diseases
• immune diseases
• lymphatic diseases
• nervous system diseases
• metabolic diseases
• endocrine diseases
• skin diseases
• musculoskeletal diseases
• male and female reproductive diseases
• urinary diseases
• rare diseases
• liver disease/hepatotoxicity
• humanized models of human development