Lost in translation: mice, men and cutaneous immunity in old age

Translational research programs offer incredible opportunities to bring cutting edge science into clinical practice. To facilitate these medical advances, funding agencies are increasingly focusing on a translational “payoff” within grant applications and larger programs. As this is the underlying promise of biomedical research—delivering advances to public health to improve the quality of life—such strategic initiatives are paramount. However, the process of taking experimental observations between model systems and human subjects can be extraordinarily frustrating. We brought together the collective expertise of our mouse and human immunology research programs to reverse engineer a clinical observation into a mouse model system. Our goal was to model (in mice) the age-related impaired delayed-type hypersensitivity response observed in humans, and then evaluate the efficacy of interventions to improve cutaneous immunity. We report here on what worked, what didn’t, and what we learned along the way.