Nonhuman primate models of asthma

Asthma is a complex human disease that does not have an accurate counterpart in any common model organism. Most of our understanding of the immune mechanisms underlying asthma comes from studies in man and mouse. However, there are fundamental differences between the spontaneous disease in man and the experimentally induced counterparts in mice. We advocate more extensive use of nonhuman primate asthma models to reconcile these differences between man and mouse. The past decade has seen dramatically increased use of mouse models of allergic asthma to study the fundamental immu-nologic causes of the disease, as con-trasted to the pharmacologic or physio-logic consequences, and to identify and test novel therapeutic strategies (1, 2). This increased focus has not been with