Development of Obliterative Bronchiolitis in a Murine Model of Orthotopic Lung Transplantation

Orthotopic lung transplantation in rats was first reported by Asimacopoulos and colleagues in 1971 (1). Currently, this method is well accepted and standardized not only for the study of allo-rejection but also between syngeneic strains for examining mechanisms of ischemia-reperfusion injury after lung transplantation. Although the application of the rat and other large animal model (2) contributed significantly to the elucidation of these studies, the scope of those investigations is limited by the scarcity of knockout and transgenic rats. Due to no effective therapies for obliterative bronchiolitis, the leading cause of death in lung transplant patients, there has been an intensive search for pre-clinical models that replicate obliterative bronchiolitis. The tracheal allograft model is the most widely used and may reproduce some of the histopathologic features of obliterative bronchiolitis (3). However, the lack of an intact vasculature with no connection to the recipient's conducting airways, and incomplete pathologic features of obliterative bronchiolitis limit the utility of this model (4). Unlike transplantation of other solid organs, vascularized mouse lung transplants have only recently been reported by Okazaki and colleagues for the first time in 2007 (5). Applying the basic principles of the rat lung transplant, our lab initiated the obliterative bronchiolitis model using minor histoincompatible antigen murine orthotopic single-left lung transplants which allows the further study of obliterative bronchiolitis immunopathogenesis(6).