Immunopathology in a novel model of chronic AIH

Progress in our understanding of autoimmune hepatitis (AIH) has been hampered by the lack of suitable animal models.We have developed a strategy to break tolerance of a negatively selected, wild-type T cell repertoire by combining a self limited infection providing a danger signal together with modified liver self-antigens into mice. To this end we generated replication-deficient adenoviral constructs expressing common autoantigens of human AIH showing homology up to 80% with the murine proteins. Following an acute phase of liver destruction with increasing levels of transaminases two weeks after intravenous inj…