Project title: Using Zebrafish Avatars of BRAIN Cancer Patients to Predict Therapeutic Outcomes and Explore Novel Therapies (zBRAIN)
The zBRAIN project advances personalized neuro-oncology by harnessing orthotopic patient-derived glioblastoma zebrafish xenograft models (“Zebrafish Avatars”) as a rapid and translational in vivo platform for therapeutic assessment.
Glioblastoma is a highly aggressive brain cancer with poor prognosis and limited therapeutic options, highlighting the urgent need for innovative patient-specific treatment approaches.
zBRAIN aims to bridge the gap between preclinical and clinical research through a co-clinical framework in which clinical data from newly diagnosed glioblastoma patients undergoing surgery are integrated with experimental data generated from each patient’s Zebrafish Avatar. The project will also employ an innovative “double-xenograft” strategy by co-transplanting patient-derived NK cells alongside tumor cells to investigate tumor–immune interactions and immune reactivity within the glioblastoma microenvironment. In parallel, zBRAIN will evaluate the in vivo efficacy of novel miRNA-based cellular therapeutics against glioblastoma.
Using advanced live confocal imaging, high-throughput in vivo drug screening, and multimodal clinical and molecular data integration supported by biostatistics and bioinformatics, zBRAIN will investigate patient-specific tumor growth, invasion, treatment response, and immune-related phenotypes in a dynamic and time-resolved manner, with the long-term goal of assessing the predictive capacity of zebrafish avatars for clinical outcomes.