E! 114899 ROBO-FISH BioReperia

Purpose and goal:

Methods where tumor cells are implanted and studied in zebrafish embryos, so-called zebrafish tumor xenograft (ZTX®) models, has the potential to revolutionize drug development, diagnostics and treatment planning within cancer, but are currently highly resource intensive. The ROBO-FISH project aims to automize the lab-processes behind these models such that more ZTX® analyses can be done in a shorter time with the goal to develop and validate robots for tumor implantation and visualization.

Expected results and effects:

The robots that will be developed within the ROBO-FISH project are expected to completely autonomously a) inject tumor cell subcutaneously, intravenously, or in the brain of thousands of zebrafish embryos daily and b) take precise images of the injected tumor cells with high resolution. It is expected that these robots in the future will allow a single person to perform tests including at least 1000 tumor-baring zebrafish embryos corresponding to diagnostics on 10-15 patients per day.

Approach and implementation:

The two partners from the Netherlands, Life Science Methods and Confocal will build the first robots that then will be tested and further developed at/with the zebrafish tumor model experts at ZeClinics (Spain), Oslo University (Norway) and BioReperia (Sweden). In Sweden we will mainly help with the development of functions allowing injection of tissue material (to facilitate patient diagnostics) and intravenous injections (to facilitate studies within immune oncology).