Coronary artery disease (CAD) is a leading cause of death in the world and one of the major risk factors for CAD is dyslipidemia. In understanding dyslipidemia and developing therapeutics, animal models, especially genetically modified animals, have played important roles and contributed greatly to progress in this field. Before the development of genetically modified animals, the Watanabe heritable hyperlipidemic (WHHL) rabbit, the first animal model for familial hypercholesterolemia, developed by Yoshio Watanabe in 1980 (Watanabe, 1980), helped to verify a low-density lipoprotein (LDL) receptor-pathway in vivo and to clarify lipoprotein metabolism in humans (Goldstein, 1983), in addition to the process by which atherosclerosis develops (Shiomi, 2009). Furthermore, WHHL rabbits have contributed to the development of hypocholesterolemic agents, statins, (Watanabe, 1981; Tsujita, 1986) and to clarifying anti-atherosclerotic effects (Watanabe, 1988; Shiomi, 1995; 2009). In the present, WHHL rabbits were improved by selective breeding to produce the WHHLMI strain, which suffers from severe and vulnerable coronary atheromatous plaques and myocardial infarction due to coronary occlusion with progression of atherosclerotic plaques (Shiomi, 2003). However, WHHL or WHHLMI rabbits were not suitable for studying the role of genes in lipid metabolism, because it is difficult to apply genetic modification techniques to rabbits.
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- Publication year
2012
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Unknown venue
- Publication date
2012-10-03
- Fields of study
Biology, Medicine
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Semantic Scholar
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