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Review
. 2022 Jul 6:15:944693.
doi: 10.3389/fnmol.2022.944693. eCollection 2022.

Zebrafish Is a Powerful Tool for Precision Medicine Approaches to Neurological Disorders

Katarzyna Ochenkowska  1   2 , Aveeva Herold  1   2 , Éric Samarut  1   2   3
Affiliations
Review

Zebrafish Is a Powerful Tool for Precision Medicine Approaches to Neurological Disorders

Katarzyna Ochenkowska et al. Front Mol Neurosci. .

Abstract

Personalized medicine is currently one of the most promising tools which give hope to patients with no suitable or no available treatment. Patient-specific approaches are particularly needed for common diseases with a broad phenotypic spectrum as well as for rare and yet-undiagnosed disorders. In both cases, there is a need to understand the underlying mechanisms and how to counteract them. Even though, during recent years, we have been observing the blossom of novel therapeutic techniques, there is still a gap to fill between bench and bedside in a patient-specific fashion. In particular, the complexity of genotype-to-phenotype correlations in the context of neurological disorders has dampened the development of successful disease-modifying therapeutics. Animal modeling of human diseases is instrumental in the development of therapies. Currently, zebrafish has emerged as a powerful and convenient model organism for modeling and investigating various neurological disorders. This model has been broadly described as a valuable tool for understanding developmental processes and disease mechanisms, behavioral studies, toxicity, and drug screening. The translatability of findings obtained from zebrafish studies and the broad prospect of human disease modeling paves the way for developing tailored therapeutic strategies. In this review, we will discuss the predictive power of zebrafish in the discovery of novel, precise therapeutic approaches in neurosciences. We will shed light on the advantages and abilities of this in vivo model to develop tailored medicinal strategies. We will also investigate the newest accomplishments and current challenges in the field and future perspectives.

Keywords: drug discovery; functional genomics; neurological disorders; precision medicine; zebrafish.

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Conflict of interest statement

ÉS was a co-founder of Modelis Inc. The commercial affiliation did not play any role in this study; in particular, it did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Functional toolbox to study the function of genetic mutation in zebrafish. Different approaches, from transient to stable can be employed and can be used depending on the type of mutation to be tested (GoF, gain-of-function; DN, dominant-negative; LoF, loss-of-function).
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
The use of zebrafish as a predictive preclinical model to accelerate various stages of drug development, from early discovery to preclinical development.
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Accelerating the development of precision medicine approaches using zebrafish.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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