Zebrafish as a Powerful Tool for Drug Discovery
A special issue of Pharmaceuticals (ISSN 1424-8247).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 September 2019) | Viewed by 37147
Special Issue Editor
Interests: pharmacology; toxicology; primary cilia; neurodevelopmental disorder; integrative omics approach; zebrafish
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Our scientific and technological knowledge has grown tremendously. The number of drugs approved per costs, however, has continuously decreased. Various approaches have emerged to increase the efficacy of research and development of new drugs. It has been widely recognized that zebrafish can be powerful tools in the drug discovery field, given advantages such as high fecundity, ease of drug administration, similarity to mammals in terms of structures and functions of various tissues, and suitability for the 3Rs (Replacement, Reduction and Refinement). The process of drug development consists of multiple steps, including the initial discovery of drugs that can be used as therapeutics, preclinical and clinical validation of their efficacy and toxicity, and the review, approval, and post-marketing surveillance of drugs by regulatory authorities. Using genome-editing technologies, genetic abnormalities observed in human diseases can be mimicked in zebrafish to make a disease model. The phenotypes of the disease model zebrafish can be used to identify novel compounds and/or new indications for old drugs (i.e., drug repositioning) that ameliorate the abnormal phenotypes of the zebrafish disease models. The toxicity of compounds can also be assessed using zebrafish. In fact, the International Council for Harmonization has considered including developmental toxicity testing using zebrafish in their guidelines. Zebrafish can also be integrated to validate the efficacy and toxicities of compounds that are identified as novel therapeutics by other approaches, such as computational drug discovery using big data. In this Special Issue, we invite authors to contribute articles focusing on zebrafish as powerful tools for drug discovery. This research topic will maximize the knowledge of the usefulness of zebrafish in drug development, with hopes of increasing the efficiency of the process and identifying drugs that can be used to prevent and/or treat diseases for which effective medications are currently lacking.
Prof. Yuhei Nishimura
Guest Editor
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Keywords
- zebrafish
- disease model
- phenotype
- drug repositioning
- computational biology
- toxicology
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