Take a look at the Figure 2 of https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19490976.2025.2... It's a live mouse, they inject a tiny amount of cancer cells, wait line a week until they replicate and fro to 200mm3[1], and then inject the bacteria and wait like another week, and the cancer dissapears. All of this while the mouse is alive.
"mouse model" is standard name. It means that is somewhat a model of a human.
[1] Cubic units are too hart to visualize, if it were a perfect sphere, the diameter would be 7mm ~= 1/4 inch.
Mouse models in papers like these mean they're using (live) mice to model human systems. They may even be altered or genetically engineered mice, which present problems of their own: for example Alzheimer's treatment candidates which work in mice that have been changed to have "Alzheimer's-like symptoms" rarely produce the same results in humans with actual Alzheimer's. But yes, in general an animal model is a cohort of live animals used to get a sense for what the effect would be like in humans.
The study was in real, living mice. From the study text:
> The experimental design employed clinically relevant dosing regimens: E. americana was administered as a single intravenous injection via tail vein at a dose of 200 μL (5 × 10⁹ CFU/mL), while anti-PD-L1 and DOX were administered intravenously every other day for four total injections at 2.5 mg/kg, representing standard therapeutic protocols.
