Zebrafish high throughput screens for development of drugs targeting sepsis, stroke and other chronic diseases

Currently there is a huge challenge in drug screens as the vast majority of the candidate drugs fail in clinical trials either due to no efficacy or drug toxicity. As an alternative to traditional animal models, zebrafish have recently emerged as a powerful vertebrate paradigm to study human disease and to use its developing embryos for drug screens. In contrast to traditional cell-based screening, the zebrafish provides a whole vertebrate system for drug screening. It combines the biological complexity with the ability for high throughput screening and quick assessment of potential toxicity. It is expected that the candidate drugs identified from the zebrafish screen will have a higher success rate than the cell-culture based screens. In this grant, we will employ zebrafish disease models of sepsis, stroke, diabetes, neurological and inflammatory diseases to screen for new chemical drugs, which will be validated in mouse models.

Faculty Supervisor:

John Marshall

Student:

Patricia Leighton

Partner:

ZebraPeutics Inc

Discipline:

Medicine

Sector:

Medical devices

University:

Program: