Collagen antibody induced arthritis.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a polygenic and multifactorial disease. Many complex immunological and genetic interactions are involved in the final out come of the clinical disease. To understand the various disease pathways operating during the disease course, we need many different animal models. Collagen induced arthritis (CIA) is one of the widely used animal models sharing many pathological and histological similarities with RA and antibodies play an important role in the inflammatory phase of CIA. This chapter describes, in detail, an animal model for arthritis using CII specific monoclonal antibodies, the so-called collagen antibody induced arthritis (CAIA), which shares many characteristics of CIA. CAIA model provides an opportunity to study the inflammatory phase of arthritis without involving the priming phase of the immune response. CAIA can be used for not only studying inflammatory processes in arthritis and screening drug candidates controlling joint inflammatory phase but also as a model for studying common mechanisms involved in many antibody mediated diseases.