Sylvia Dyballa, Maria Rubio Brotons, Rafael Miñana Prieto, Tiziana Pederzani, Carles Cornet, Javier Terriente Felix. ZeClinics SL, PRBB, Barcelona, SPAIN.
ABSTRACT
In the ZeCardio platform we use zebrafish larvae to perform high throughput screening of large compound libraries in live organisms. The advantages of the zebrafish larvaemodel are two-fold: i) large progeny, which develops externally and rapidly, allows parallel testing of dozens of molecules and ii) zebrafish larvae are transparent and small whichmake them ideal for non-invasive approaches, such as in vivo imaging. On top of that, the zebrafish cardiovascular system is analogous to humans, allowing the use of zebrafish larva for predicting the impact of drugs with high reliability. In particular we follow two lines of cardiac research: cardiotoxicity assessment and cardiomyopathy therapydiscovery. The ZeCardio platform integrates the high throughput system Vast Bioimager™ & LP Sampler™ and a Leica high speed imaging setup to allow the screening ofhundreds of embryos in a day. This setup enables the fully automatized acquisition of cardiovascular in vivo data. The acquired high-resolution video data are then analysed by ourcustom-made software: ZeCardio™ that can extract quickly and efficiently a plethora of relevant cardiovascular parameters: heart rate, arrhythmia, AV blockage, ejection fraction and blood flow and vasodilatation/ constriction. Most of these physiological parameters are not possible to test in in vitro systems (i.e.: ejection fraction or blood flow) and/or are extremely expensive and time-consuming to test in larger animals.
The ZeCardio Platform: High Throughput Cardiotoxicity Screening with Zebrafish Embryos
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