Posted on 06/23/2009 5:13:56 PM PDT by nickcarraway
If asked to name the creature most similar to humans, most people would likely pick some sort of primate. Very few would think of zebra fish.
But as the researchers at InDanio Bioscience can attest, the striped aquarium staple shares many similarities with humans and could hold the key to greatly improved human health.
InDanio, a drug-discovery company based in Toronto's MaRS Discovery District, focuses on nuclear receptors, a class of proteins that are related to some of the most devastating and prevalent diseases on the planet, including immune disorders, obesity, diabetes and most cancers.
The problem is, the majority of proposed drugs never see the marketplace because they fail toxicology tests or have other unintended effects on the body.
In vitro, or test tube, testing is usually a robotic process, quick but often poor at predicting how a drug will affect a living thing.
In-vivo testing, which is a slower, later-stage process and uses living organisms, works best when that organism is very similar in makeup to a human being.
Fish similar to humans
Zebra fish, which are vertebrates, have many of the same organs as humans and are genetically similar.
InDanio uses the fish to combine the most favourable aspects of robotic and animal testing, creating a process that is “high-throughput” – in a word, fast – but also one that results in much more information about a drug than can be garnered through simple robotic testing.
Because InDanio performs tests on whole animals, the company is able to tell how a chemical will affect organs, how stable it is in the body and how toxic it might be, said Henry Krause, InDanio's president.
(Excerpt) Read more at theglobeandmail.com ...
I know someone who used to keep zebra fish. They’d get up a good head of steam and jump out of the tank.
They love their freedom, even if it kills them.
So, you are saying they aren't really like humans?
Not really. More like Iranians recently.
Zebra fish are like humans. Do they suffer from Narcissistic Megalomania too?
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