HCT116 colorectal and MCF7 brest cancer cell lines xenografted into zebrafish embryos gives insight into the importance of microenviroment in tumor growth and metastasis for a future use of the model in clinical research

Abstract

Zebrafish has emerged as one of the best models to characterize different human diseases due to his genetic similarity (75% of orthologous genes), and more specific, cancer. For this reason, zebrafish has been used in cancer research by means of the xenograft technique (injection of human cancer cells in embryos or adults of this model organism). The objective of this technique is simulate a human-like microenvironment inside a model organism in order to study the disease development with a fastest and accurate approach. As long as the xenograft technique has been implemented in zebrafish, mentioned before, there has been improvements to this technique and the conditions surrounding it. Nevertheless, there are some bottle necks with the necessity of being addressed with the objective of getting a more robust and informative technique in order to establish it in a near future in the personalized medicine field.