The Domestic Ferret (Mustela putorius furo) as a Lethal Infection Model for 3 Species of Ebolavirus

Cross, Robert W.; Mire, Chad E.; Borisevich, Viktoriya; Geisbert, Joan B.; Fenton, Karla A.; Geisbert, Thomas W.

NHPs have historically served as the gold standard for modeling filovirus pathogenesis because they recapitulate many features of human disease, including fever, vascular leakage, and coagulopathy, without the need for virus adaptation. Several immunocompetent small-animal models have been developed for ZEBOV, including mice, hamsters, and guinea pigs. However, all of these small-animal models require host adaptation of the challenge virus [1] . Some severely immunodeficient models have been described, allowing the use of wild-type virus, but there are substantial limitations in the usefulness of these models in the development of countermeasures for circumstances in which dependency on an intact immune response is central [1, 2] . A further limitation is that only the NHP models account for the different species of Ebolavirus beyond ZEBOV, with the recent exception of guinea pig models of SEBOV [3, 4] .