Zebrafish Avatars: A Translational Model for Cancer Pharmacology & Precision Oncology

The zebrafish has emerged as one of the most widely used and well-funded model organisms in pre-clinical cancer research over the past decade, recognized for its exceptional ability to bridge experimental discovery with clinical relevance. Its unique advantages (particularly real-time, whole-organism visualization of tumor growth, invasion, metastasis, and drug response) set it apart from other in vivo cancer models. What makes the zebrafish model even more powerful for pharmacological research is the use of patient-derived xenografts, i.e. the transplantation of cancer cells from a patient’s tumor into zebrafish, creating the "Zebrafish Avatars". The Zebrafish Avatar enables the identification individualized pharmacotherapeutic responses in real-time, within ultra-short timeframes and at medium- to high-throughput capacity. By integrating high-resolution imaging, pharmacological screening, and multi-omics analyses, Zebrafish Avatars represent a transformative in vivo platform with the potential to accelerate anticancer drug discovery and refine precision-oncology decisions across multiple cancer types. This webinar will trace the evolution of Zebrafish Avatars from preclinical drug-screening tools to predictive models of patient outcomes, highlighting recent breakthroughs from co-clinical studies that demonstrate their capacity to forecast personalized therapeutic efficacy. We will showcase the distinctive features of Zebrafish Avatars through recent flagship studies that are reshaping translational cancer research, precision oncology, and cancer pharmacology. The webinar will also provide some insights from our recently funded "zBRAIN" study, the first co-clinical trial that aims to develop a double-xenograft Zebrafish Avatar model from newly diagnosed glioblastoma patients by co-transplanting patient-derived brain tumor cells and natural killer cells, in order to uncover tumor–immune dynamics in glioblastoma and predict patient-specific treatment outcomes.