Background: Current animal models of chronic pancreatitis (CP) often provide only limited pathophysio- logical insights since they incompletely reflect the human disease. CP induced by injection of dibutyltin dichloride (DBTC-pancreatitis) shares with human CP the important feature of extended fibrosis and would be an even more attractive model if it could be transferred from rats to mice, as recently sug- gested in the context of combined ethanol and DBTC application. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of DBTC in pancreas and liver of C57BL/6 mice, a strain commonly used to engineer genetic mouse mod-els.Methods: C57BL/6 mice and Lewis rats were exposed to variable doses of DBTC. After an investigation period of up to 4 weeks, laboratory findings and histopathological changes of pancreas and liver were evaluated. Results: Chronic DBTC-pancreatitis in rats was characterized by acinar cell damage, ductal changes, fi- brosis, and inflammatory cell infiltrates. Mice treated with DBTC at 6–8 mg/kg body weight, the standard doses in rats, showed transient increases of lipase activities but no morphological signs of chronic DBTC- pancreatitis 4 weeks after injection of the drug. Increased doses of 10–12 mg/kg DBTC were intolerable due to their high toxicity. In contrast, mice and rats presented with a similar histopathology of the liver that can be characterized as a chronic-proliferative DBTC-cholangitis with predominating damage and proliferation of the small bile ducts as well as secondary portal inflammatory cell infiltrates and a begin- ning portal fibrosis. Conclusions: The DBTC-model cannot be transferred from rats to C57BL/6 mice with respect to chronic DBTC-pancreatitis, but might be of interest to study DBTC-cholangitis in both species.