When medical scientists try to find a cure for disease X, they usually start by engineering an animal model that exhibits the etiology (or at very least, the symptoms) of the disease.

I’ve been writing recently about genetic mouse models of autism which, because of the heterogeneity and “humanness” of the condition, are extremely difficult to make.

I was pretty surprised to learn today that scientists have also had major difficulties making a mouse model of a decidedly less complex condition: acne.

The first problem is that mice are hairy. But that one’s easy to circumvent: use bald mice.

The bigger problem lies in the nature of acne, the pus-filled legions that crop up when bacteria infects hair follicles. Those bacteria can’t survive without oil in the skin, and the bald mice apparently don’t have enough oil.

So what did some clever scientists turn to? Teflon. As published in PLoS ONE in February, dermatologist Chun-Ming Huang and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego put human cells into tiny Teflon chambers, and stuck those chambers under the abdominal skin of mice. After letting them thrive for a bit, they infected the cells with Propionibacterium acnes bacteria and, voilà, pimples!

They isolated some proteins coming from the bacteria and from the liquid that oozed from the pimples, both of which will apparently be useful for developing an acne vaccine (talk about a blockbuster drug…). Super. For me, it’s the methods that make this a great story. Who doesn’t love the image of itty bitty pimples growing on itty bitty Teflon pans in the belly of a mouse?!

(Hat tip: Today in Mice)