Animal Models Shared Resource – Zebrafish

Overview

The mission of the Animal Models Shared Resource – Zebrafish is to provide ready access to fish and fish embryos, and expertise in the use of the zebrafish model organism to the GUMC research community, and the NCI-designated Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center (LCCC) Research Consortium. Within this Consortium, the AMSR-Zebrafish provides comprehensive support to researchers at both the LCCC in Washington, DC, and the John Theurer Cancer Center in New Jersey, which includes research at the Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI). Zebrafish are amenable to a wide range of experimental manipulations because zebrafish embryos are easily obtained in large numbers, they are externally fertilized, transparent, permeable to small molecules and drugs, and undergo rapid organogenesis. In addition, they have many of the same tissues and organ systems as humans. Moreover, due to their small size, large numbers of fish can be housed for relatively low cost, facilitating genetic studies and the generation of numerous transgenic and mutant fish lines.

The award-winning documentary Zebrafish: Practically People, Transforming the Study of Disease highlights the way these fish are being used in labs as a biomedical research model. Examples of the use of zebrafish in cancer research include: (1) Xenotransplantation of biopsy tissue from individual pancreatic cancer patients into zebrafish embryos (Zevatars), enabling rapid (5-7 days) chemosensitivity analyses to inform personalized cancer care (Xiao et al, 2020); and (2) Zebrafish xenograft models have been used to investigate cancer cell biology and to screen anti-cancer drugs (Tiek, et al, 2019).

Location

Georgetown University – 4000 Reservoir Road NW, Washington, DC 20817

• Building D, Rm 343
• Division of Comparative Medicine, G17c

External users: Science Exchange

Internal users: Click here for instrument scheduling