Abstract
Numbers of patients suffering from certain allergic disorders have been increasing worldwide. New allergens and haptens including chemicals, insects, and fruits, with different characters as standard allergens like pollen and house dust mite antigens have been reported almost every year. In advanced countries, there must be almost 30% of human subjects with not only serious allergic diseases but also seasonal or very mild allergies. Particularly, allergic diseases such as asthma, urticaria, food allergy, and atopic dermatitis may show negative influence on the quality of lives of patients as well as their families. Since serious allergic inflammation will induce mental stress, severe allergic diseases have become one of social problems. Multifocal investigation must take place to develop effective new drugs and therapies for subjects with allergic diseases. However, collecting samples from patients is sometimes difficult and insufficient for researchers. Therefore, detailed studies with animal models representing human allergic diseases is necessary. Moreover, placebo effects or nocebo effects never modify the results obtained from animal studies, indicating that researchers isolate true efficacy of tested regents without any modifications. We can evaluate new drug candidates, supplements, and functional foods by screening with animal models. In the current review, we summarize animal models for allergic disease including passive, active, genetically-modified models as well as the world famous spontaneous model for human atopic dermatitis, NC/Tnd mice, which has been analyzed and reported by us. Furthermore, another spontaneous model that lives with humans and develops quite similar diseases to humans, companion dogs, will be introduced. Our clinical research works using companion dogs suffered from allergic dermatitis, such as oral supplementation with mild phospholipids and shampoo treatment with the novel reagent will be outlined. Finally, we introduce the skin disorder quite similar to human urticaria in affected horses, expecting to bring a new insight into the comparative research for human disease with one of epoch-making animal models.
