【Animal Modeling】-How to prepare a zebrafish eye tumor model?

  Retinoblastoma (RB) is a common eye cancer in children. Among infant eye diseases, it is the most serious and harmful malignant tumor. Occurs in the nuclear layer of the retina and has a family genetic predisposition. 90% of patients are infants under 3 years of age. They can suffer from one eye, two eyes one after another or at the same time, and are prone to intracranial and extracranial metastases, often endangering the lives of children. When the tumor proliferates into the vitreous or close to the lens, yellow light reflection appears in the pupil area, so it is called black cat's eye.

  The main treatments now include surgery, radiotherapy, cryotherapy, photocoagulation, chemotherapy, photodynamic therapy and immunotherapy, but surgical removal of the eyeball is still a better treatment at present. Carboplatin and melphalan are common drugs for the treatment of retinoblastoma, which are used for systemic chemotherapy and ophthalmic artery interventional chemotherapy, respectively. Although these clinical treatments have significantly improved the eyeball retention rate of RB, there are still many patients who must accept the result of lifelong blindness due to eyeball removal. Therefore, we hope to obtain a drug that has better efficacy and low toxicity after being administered via vein, artery or vitreous cavity.

  In vitro anticancer drug screening experiment has the advantages of rapid and efficient, but its pharmacodynamics and safety evaluation results are not comparable. The commonly used tumor transplantation model for anti-tumor drug screening in vivo experiments is immunodeficient nude mice. However, this metastatic system has problems such as uncertain survival rate, time-consuming, and expensive, and it is impossible to quickly screen suitable new drugs. Therefore, the development of a simple, efficient, fast and low-cost in vivo evaluation model is of great significance for the treatment of retinoblastoma.

  Zebrafish is very popular among scholars because of its transparent juvenile stage, small size, low cost, and high homology with the human body. Here will quote the research results published by Professor Dong HyunJo of Seoul University and others on Molecular Cancer about the establishment of orthotopic transplantation models of zebrafish retinoblastoma. Dong et al. injected retinoblastoma cells into the vitreous of young zebrafish eyes and found that cancer cells can survive and proliferate in the vitreous of zebrafish. After the retinoblastoma cells in the zebrafish vitreous were isolated, the analysis by Western Blotting and RT-PCR showed that the cancer cells maintained their biological characteristics after being transferred and isolated.