A GENETIC APPROACH TO DEVELOP NOVEL MOUSE MODELS OF LIVER DISEASE

在英国，肝病现在是第五大最常见的死亡原因，大约4%的人口有证据表明肝脏正在受到损害。重要的是要更多地了解肝病的病因，以便开发新的治疗方法或防止肝脏损伤的发生。这个项目旨在帮助我们解开肝病背后的一些复杂的生物学问题，以便我们能够在未来开发和评估新的治疗方法。很明显，许多因素导致了患者肝脏疾病的发展，其中一个因素是他们的遗传背景。我们将通过选取DNA随机突变的小鼠并筛查肝脏异常来识别促成基因。由于当易感人群受到药物、酒精或超重的挑战时，可能会发生肝病，我们将利用这些挑战来提高我们筛查计划的敏感度。因此，除了确定导致肝病的最重要基因外，我们还将开发出可用于测试新疗法的肝病小鼠模型。

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.