However, except for HIV and EBV, the other human viral pathogens have often only been tested in one or two studies in mice with human immune system components. The obtained information is often too sparse to judge whether these infections faithfully recapitulate pathogenesis in patients. Moreover, the low number of

animals analyzed in the respective experiments begs for further characterization, in greater detail. Although the reconstitution of human immune system components has been catalogued in detail and the T cells as well as B cells arising in these systems have been PKC412 purchase shown to possess a highly diversified antigen receptor repertoire [8, 57-59], the characterization of the Lapatinib supplier immune competence of the reconstituted immune system lags behind. While primary lymphoid tissues such as thymus and BM are populated with human cells and support the development of B-cell and T-cell compartments [60, 61], the development of secondary lymphoid tissues is compromised, with only few lymph nodes developing and a disorganized white pulp structure in the spleen [62]. Given that isotype switching and affinity maturation of B-cell responses depend much more on these secondary lymphoid structures than T-cell responses [63], isotype-switched B-cell responses

are difficult to achieve in these models. This is in contrast to T-cell responses, which develop readily in response to pathogen challenge in mice with reconstituted human immune system components. Accordingly, specific antibody responses to HIV, HSV-2, JC Docetaxel virus, dengue virus, and EBV were mostly IgM after infection and only a minor subset of reconstituted mice developed IgG responses against viral antigens [22, 40, 49, 50, 52, 53, 64]. Improved interactions of human B cells with CD4+ follicular helper T cells might overcome this

shortcoming [65], but currently no protocol that would consistently ensure these interactions has been established. Moreover, no studies have so far addressed the protective value of the observed B-cell responses by B-cell depletion, for example. Thus, it remains unclear to which extent protective anti-viral humoral immune responses can be modeled in mice with reconstituted human immune system compartments. Partly due to this limitation, the protective value of antibodies is starting to be assessed by passive immunization in these in vivo models. It was recently documented that HIV was able to escape neutralizing antibody monotherapy during infection of reconstituted mice, but that a pool of five HIV neutralizing antibodies controlled HIV viral load [66]. This protection lasted 60 days after cessation of therapy. Taking it one step further, a HIV-neutralizing IgA antibody was expressed in human hematopoietic progenitors by lentiviral transduction and following reconstitution, a protective effect was observed against mucosal transmission of HIV [67].