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. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS: 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.
NIH ExPorter
NIH ExPorter