Angiogenesis inhibition is a powerful approach for ameliorating cancer and reversing diabetic retinopathy. Since the zebrafish is a vertebrate with transparent embryos it is an exceptional model for performing high throughput drug screening. In Phase I research, we propose to evaluate blood vessel development after exposure to chemical libraries. The long range goal of this research is to develop zebrafish as a novel tool for performing bioassays to elucidate a number of different biological processes. As research to identify genes and their functions accelerates, the biopharmaceutical industry will increasingly employ cell based assays for therapeutic drug development.
Use of zebrafish as a model for therapeutic drug screening will significantly improve therapeutic development. Zebrafish is a vertebrate and lends itself to automated bioassay of chemical libraries estimated to be a $500M market.
