ZANDR -The Zebrafish Platform Austria for preclinical drug screening

Venue:  Polo Ferrari 2, via Sommarive 9 (Povo) – Room B105
Time: 12.30 

Speaker

• Martin Distel - St. Anna Children’sCancer Research Institute, Wien, Austria

Abstract:

Zebrafish hasproven to be a valuable model organism to investigate and dissect diseasedriving mechanisms of human diseases. A unique feature among well establishedvertebrate model organisms is  the possibility to carry out phenotypicsmall compound screens in higher throughput using zebrafish larvae. 
Towards this goal, we haverecently established an automated zebrafish disease model drug screeningplatform, which we termed „Zebrafish Platform Austria for preclinical drugscreening (ZANDR)“ (www.zandr-ccri.at). The new infrastructureallows for automated sorting of zebrafish larvae into multi-well plates,automated image acquisition as well as automated image analysis. We will applythis new infrastructure to identify therapeutic compounds for pediatric cancersusing both, genetically engineered zebrafish cancer models as well asxenotransplantation approaches. Importantly, the ZANDR platform is open to thescientific community.