Danio rerio as a model of serious human diseases

(ENGLISH) Over the last five decades, zebrafish (Danio rerio) has become a useful vertebrate model organism for the field of developmental biology and disease control. Using zebrafish in xenotransplantation studies is becoming more popular and progressed towards drug screening of anti-cancer drugs. Zebrafish are particularly suitable for high-throughput pre-clinical drug screening, due to the small size of embryos and the striking evolutionary conservation of cancer- related pathways between human and zebrafish. The fast, large-scale evaluation of the cancer- drug response in vivo could facilitate progress in personalized cancer therapy. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of methods which would allow for rapid and sensitive evaluation of tumor cell growth to facilitate high-throughput screening of drugs in vivo. In our bioluminescent zebrafish transplantation model, we proposed and validated a new screening platform for pre-clinical drug discovery in zebrafish embryos. In our experiments we used the NanoLuc luciferase, which enabled us to rapidly screen inhibitors of cancer growth in a sensitive and quantitative way with very low background compared to the conventional fluorescence signal. In our screen we evaluated the in vivo drug response of 180 kinase inhibitors in zebrafish embryos..