Maintenance of human skin tissue and cellularity after engraftment in immunodeficient mouse model

A lack of an appropriate animal model to study human skin in vivo remains a major problem. Human skin explant can be conserved only few days in culture medium. For these reasons, it is necessary to developed humanized mice model with human skin graft for studying of skin innate and adaptive responses. Humanized mice model with human skin engraftment have been Non-obese diabetic-SCID gamma chain null mice (NSG, NOD.Cg-PrkdcscidIL2rg tmlWjl/Sz) were engrafted with fresh human skin obtained from healthy volunteers undergoing plastic surgery of breast, abdomen or face lifting. Eighty-two mice were engrafted with 16 different human skin with standard operating procedure. A failure of human skin engraftment was found in 21 (25.6%) of the engrafted mice, due to partial or total human skin necrosis. We observed very good or good engrafted skin behavior in 61 humanized mice (78.6%), with preservation of the structures of the human skin compared to non-engrafted human skin and conservation of the major skin resident immune Antigen Presenting Cells 1 to 3-week post-graft. Here, we described the standard operating procedure, and performance of human skin engraftment in NOD-Scid IL2rgamma(null) mouse model with the maintenance of skin epidermal tissue and cells