Drug testing using zebrafish July 16, 2008

The Scientist has a short but quite interesting article on how some scientists are using zebrafish to test drugs. As the article says, the zebrafish is the only model system that has organ systems comparable to ours (it’s a vertebrate, it has a heart, blood, nervous system, etc), that also fits into 96-well plates … combine that with efficient techniques for creating transgenic animals (a company sells a library of 11,000 mutant lines), full transparency, and you get a system with an amazing potential for discovering potential drug candidates, predicting side-effects, understanding mechanisms of action, etc. Most likely, all that’s missing right now is a smart system for automated image analysis …