Zebrafish Avatars, towards personalised medicine

Despite advances in targeted cancer treatments, we still lack methods to predict how a specific cancer in a specific patient will respond to a given therapy. Consequently, patients undergo rounds-of-trial-and-error approaches based on guidelines to find the best treatment, often subjected to unnecessary toxicity. We have been developing zebrafish xenografts, also known as zAvatars, as sensors for cancer behavior and personalized therapy screening. This approach is based on the injection of tumor cells from patients into zebrafish embryos to then test which is the most effective therapy for that particular patient. Our data show that this model not only shows sufficient resolution to distinguish functional tumor behaviors in just 4-days, but also reveals differential sensitivity to anti-cancer therapies.
zAVATARS can predict patient clinical outcome in 91% of the cases in colorectal cancer, 100% in breast cancer and 89% in ovarian cancer. We have also expanded our assay to screen responses to radiotherapy and targeted therapies.