Pathological observations on nude mice

Abstract

With the increasing use of nude mice in cancer research, two problems arise which make it desirable to have a knowledge of their pathology. The first is the difficulty almost every laboratory has encountered at one time or another in keeping the colony healthy. In all but the most perfect set-up there are occasional breakdowns, and a knowledge of some of the major tissue changes in diseases of nude mice may help to minimise the time lost when a colony requires to be re-derived. Second, since these animals are being autopsied more carefully in the search for metastases or for drug effects on xenografted tumours than is sometimes the case in other animal tumour experiments, there is a possibility that unfamiliarity with the normal tissue appearances in health and disease may lead to errors of interpretation. One good illustration of the need for routine naked-eye and histological examination of nude mice is the fact that it took 2 years for it to become known that the nude mouse was athymic (Pantelouris, 1968).