Beta cells, islet models

Butler AE, Janson J, Soeller WC, Butler PC. Increased beta-cell apoptosis prevents adaptive increase in beta-cell mass in mouse model of type 2 diabetes evidence for role of islet amyloid formation rather than direct action of amyloid. Diabetes. 2003 52(9) 2304-2314. 

Virostko, J., Radhika, A., Poffenberger, G., Chen, Z.Y., Brissova, M., Gilchrist, J., et al. Bioluminescence Imaging in Mouse Models Quantifies beta Cell Mass in the Pancreas and After Islet Transplantation. Mol. Imaging Biol. 12, 42-53 (2010)... 

Therapeutics and target validation studies will certainly be tested in animals. Ribozymes have been used in transgenic mice to create disease models such as diabetes by selectively downregulating the hexokinase mRNA in pancreatic islets. In this case, the ribozyme expression was under the control of the insulin promoter, and was therefore only expressed in the pancreatic beta cells. Retroviral delivery of ribozymes targeted against neuregulin-1 in a chick blastoderm resulted in the same embryonic lethal... 

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