A Hitchhiker's guide to humanized mice: new pathways to studying viral infections

Humanized mice are increasingly appreciated as an incredibly powerful platform for infectious disease research. The often very narrow species tropism of many viral infections, coupled with the sometimes misleading results from preclinical studies in animal models further emphasize the need for more predictive model systems based on human cells rather than surrogates. Humanized mice represent such a model and have been greatly enhanced with regards to their immune system reconstitution as well as immune functionality in the past years, resulting in their recommendation as a preclinical model by the US Food and Drug Administration. This review aims to give a detailed summary of the generation of human peripheral blood lymphocyte, CD34(+) haematopoietic stem cell- and bone marrow/liver/thymus-reconstituted mice and available improved models (e.g. myeloid- or T-cell-only mice, MISTRG, NSG-SGM3). Additionally, we summarize human-tropic viral infections, for which humanized mice offer a novel approach for the study of disease pathogenesis as well as future perspectives for their use in biomedical, drug and vaccine research.