A GENETIC APPROACH TO DEVELOP NOVEL MOUSE MODELS OF LIVER DISEASE

肝病现在是英国第五大常见的死亡原因，大约4%的人口有持续肝损伤的证据。重要的是要了解更多关于肝病的原因，以便开发新的治疗方法或预防肝损伤的发生。该项目旨在帮助我们解开肝病背后的一些复杂生物学，以便我们将来能够开发和评估新的治疗方法。很明显，许多因素有助于患者肝脏疾病的发展，其中一个因素是他们的遗传背景。我们将通过在小鼠的DNA中随机突变并筛查肝脏异常来确定贡献基因。由于当易感者受到药物、酒精或超重的挑战时可能会发生肝脏疾病，我们将利用这些挑战来提高我们筛查计划的敏感性。因此，除了确定导致肝脏疾病的最重要的基因外，我们还将开发肝脏疾病的小鼠模型，可用于测试新的治疗方法。

Liver disease is now the 5th most common cause of death in the United Kingdom and about 4% of the population have evidence of ongoing liver damage. It is important to find out more about the causes of liver disease so that new treatments can be developed or to prevent liver damage occurring. This project aims to help us unravel some of the complex biology behind liver disease so that we can develop and evaluate new treatments in the future. It is clear that many factors contribute to the development of liver disease in patients and one of those factors is their genetic background. We will identify contributory genes by taking mice with random mutations in their DNA and screening for liver abnormalities. As liver disease may occur when a susceptible person is challenged with a drug, alcohol or by being overweight we will use the challenges to increase the sensitivity of our screening programme. Therefore, in addition to identifying the most important genes which cause liver disease we will also develop mouse models of liver disease which could be used for testing new treatments.