Zebrafish: A Complete Animal Model for In Vivo Drug Discovery and Development

Chiranjib      Chakraborty; Chi   Hsin   Hsu; Zhi   Hong   Wen; Chang   Shing   Lin; Govindasamy      Agoramoorthy

doi:10.2174/138920009787522197

Abstract

In last few years, the use of zebrafish (Danio rerio) in scientific research is growing very rapidly. Initially, it was a popular as a model of vertebrate development because zebrafish embryos are transparent and also develop rapidly. Presently, the research using zebrafish is expanding into other areas such as pharmacology, clinical research as a diseases model and interestingly in drug discovery. The use of zebrafish in pharmaceutical research and discovery and drug development is mainly screening of lead compounds, target identification, target validation, morpholino oligonucleotide screens, assay development for drug discovery, physiology based drug discovery, quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) and structure – activity relationships (SAR) study and drug toxicity study. In this paper, we have described properly all the areas of dug discovery where zebrafish is used as a tool. We are hopeful that the use of these techniques or methods will make the zebrafish a prominent model in drug discovery and development research in the forthcoming years.

Keywords: Zebrafish, animal model, in vivo drug discovery, physiology based drug discovery, screening of compounds, target identification, target validation, drug toxicity study