Superior drug screening in Alzheimer's Disease
Transgenic zebrafish model for rapid, low-cost, high throughput screening of therapeutic agents for Alzheimer's Disease
The only available in-vivo tool for pre-clinical evaluation of potential drug agents for Alzheimer's disease (AD) is transgenic mice models. This current approach has limitations in high throughput screening due to the large animal numbers needed and the significant costs and time associated with undertaking such experiments.
The zebrafish is becoming increasingly popular in drug screening as they are available in large numbers and have a very rapid developmental cycle with a basic embryology and brain development that is similar to humans. Developing a high throughput in-vivo assay using the transgenic zebrafish model for AD would be appealing to the pharmaceutical industry.
The benefits of using zebrafish are their availability in large numbers, their very good visibility and very rapid development compared to other vertebrate models. This allows for rapid screening of potential drug candidates. It has been estimated that the maintenance cost of zebrafish are less than 1/1000th the cost of maintaining mice.
The team at ECU's Centre of Excellence for Alzheimer's disease Research is currently validating an assay for beta amyloid (A) toxicity using non-transgenic zebrafish to establish baseline controls and in parallel is developing the transgenic zebrafish model for AD. This in-vivo assay would be suitable for rapidly screening potential therapeutic agents that neutralise Atoxicity.