A NEW MODEL FOR PANCREATITIS

Pancreatitis induced by ligation of the pancreatic duct produces morph ologic similarities to human pancreatitis. This model is easily perfor med in big animals, but it is very difficult to perform pancreatic duc t ligation in small animals. Many experimental studies of pharmaceutic al treatments for pancreatitis used pancreatic duct-ligation models, b ut it is also difficult to evaluate the efficacy of the drugs used, be cause the animals used are of different species with individual differ ences. To overcome these problems, we ligated the main pancreatic duct of the splenic lobe by a 5.0 absorbable suture by using a surgical mi croscope and left the gastroduodenal lobe intact in the same rats. Thi s model produced damaged pancreatic tissue in one part and normal panc reatic tissue in another part of the pancreas in the same animals, bio chemically and histologically. We evaluated the effect of a new protea se inhibitor (ONO-3404) on this preliminary model and found this new p rotease inhibitor demonstrated a hypertrophic effect on the damaged pa ncreatic tissue and the normal pancreatic tissue in the same animals. This model is also useful to study pharmaceutic treatment for pancreat ic insufficiency and to study chemically induced pancreatic carcinogen esis in the damaged pancreatic tissue and the normal pancreatic tissue in the same animals.