Animal Models of Inflammatory Bowel Disease for Drug Discovery

Abstract Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic, relapsing intestinal inflammatory condition with increasing incidence and prevalence around the world. Conventional and biological therapies have been successfully, or unsuccessfully, applied for the treatment of IBD and several new biological therapies are currently in clinical development. So far, more than 69 kinds of animal models have been established to study IBD, and they have provided significant contributions not only for understanding the mechanism of IBD but also for developing the rationale of new therapies. Although individual animal models can not fully reflect the pathogenesis of human IBD, the data from animal models—if a consensus is reached from many but not from one or few—may be used as a predictive factor of effectiveness for some biological therapies. Therefore, in this Chapter, we will discuss this possibility by comparing the data from animal models of IBD with data from some clinical trials.