This study established the utility of glial chimeras for studying the biology of human gliotrophic viruses in vivo, and promises to be the first of many using human glial-transplanted animals to investigate human-specific brain infections in vivo. Perhaps most importantly though, the work also revealed the limits of our knowledge of these human gliotropic encephalitides, and hence the great promise afforded by human glial chimeras for both mechanistic discovery and therapeutic modeling of these previously enigmatic and still-lethal disorders.
