A model of Zebrafish Avatar for co-clinical trials

Abstract

Animal Avatars and co-clinical trials represent an emerging concept for implementing schemes of personalized medicine in oncology. In a co-clinical trial, the cancer cells of the patient tumor are xenotransplanted in the animal Avatar for drug efficacy studies and data collected in the animal trial are used to plan the best drug treatment in the patient trial. Recently, zebrafish has been proposed for implementing Avatar models but the lack of a general criterion for chemotherapy dose conversion from humans to fishes represents a limitation for conducting co-clinical trials.\n\nHere, we validate a simple, reliant and cost-effective Avatar model based on the use of zebrafish larvae; by crossing data from safety and efficacy studies, we found a basic formula for the estimation of the dose to be used for running co-clinical trials and we validate it in a clinical study enrolling 24 adult patients with solid cancers (XenoZ, NCT03668418).