Children who are diagnosed with neuroblastoma — a cancer of the nervous system — usually have a poor prognosis, and only about 30% survive the disease longer than five years.
Now a researcher at Rice University is using a novel model organism, zebrafish, to study the developing nervous system and figure out how neuroblastoma originates. Knowing more about how the disease arises could lead to more successful treatments.
Rosa Uribe was recruited to the department of biochemistry and cell biology with the help of a First-Time Tenure-Track award from CPRIT. She was a postdoctoral fellow in biology and biological engineering at the California Institute of Technology.
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Children who are diagnosed with neuroblastoma — a cancer of the nervous system — usually have a poor prognosis, and only about 30% survive the disease longer than five years.
Now a researcher at Rice University is using a novel model organism, zebrafish, to study the developing nervous system and figure out how neuroblastoma originates. Knowing more about how the disease arises could lead to more successful treatments.
Rosa Uribe was recruited to the department of biochemistry and cell biology with the help of a First-Time Tenure-Track award from CPRIT. She was a postdoctoral fellow in biology and biological engineering at the California Institute of Technology.
Uribe studies stem cells in early embryonic development that are unique to vertebrates — any organism with a backbone — called “neural crest” cells. These later develop into many different types of cells in the body, including neurons, cartilage, and skin cells.
If these neural crest cells are somehow compromised during development they can lead to cancer or other diseases in babies and very young children. Neuroblastoma develops when genetically-mutated neural crest cells proliferate and quickly migrate out of control. Tumors can appear anywhere in the nervous system, and the disease usually affects children under five years old. It’s the most common solid tumor diagnosed in infancy.
Uribe uses zebrafish, a one-to-two–inch common aquarium fish, to study the development of neural crest cells. Zebrafish embryos develop outside their mothers and are transparent, making them easy to study under a microscope. A single fish can lay hundreds of eggs, and even thousands of zebrafish take up relatively little space in a laboratory.
Using genetically modified fish that are prone to developing neuroblastoma, Uribe labels proteins with fluorescent dyes so she can study the movement of neural crest cells as they develop. She can compare them with fish developing normally to see different cellular characteristics between the two populations of neural crest cells as they develop in the living embryos.
Zebrafish can also be used to screen rapidly for drugs that could possibly be used to treat neuroblastoma. “Zebrafish can produce thousands of embryos at the same time,” Uribe says, “and we can simply screen through these fish when they are really young and test hundreds or thousands of drugs to see if any of them can prevent the development or spread of the disease.”
If she finds anything promising, the drugs would first be tested in mice and human cell cultures before being introduced to a human clinical trial.
Uribe says the CPRIT award has propelled her research twice as fast as it would have with a normal research startup. “I was able to buy large, expensive pieces of equipment to enable the drug screening and live imaging,” she says, “which allows us to do the experiments we need to do and hire high-quality lab personnel right off the bat.”
Uribe completed her undergraduate degree in cell and molecular biology at San Francisco State University, and her Ph.D. in molecular cell and developmental biology at The University of Texas at Austin. She became a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech in 2012.
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