Zebrafish: A model system to study acute pain and Parkinson´s disease
By: Ana Correia
From: FMUL
At: Instituto de Investigação Interdisciplinar, Anfiteatro
[2011-12-13]
Modern drug discovery involves a wide variety of pre-clinical approaches for the identification and validation of new therapeutics. In this context, zebrafish (Danio rerio) has become an attractive vertebrate model for several therapeutic areas, including blood diseases, diabetes, muscular dystrophy, neurodegenerative disease and angiogenesis. Regarding pain and Parkinson´s disease, they are priority topics in medical research for many years, although there are still few drugs approved for clinical use. One reason is the lack of appropriate animal models that faithfully recapitulate relevant hallmarks associated with these human diseases.This talk summarizes the recent progress in the development of novel zebrafish models to study acute pain and Parkinson´s disease and outlines the potential of these models to contribute to drug discovery.