Simply hold swimming: UO researchers’ dedication to discovery

Sofia Campbell/Daily Emerald

In the basement of UO’s Huestis Hall is a library filled with fish. Small, stripy blue zebrafish swim 30 to a container within the heat underground laboratory. Their skinny, book-shaped tanks stack into cabinets that proceed for rows upon rows. 

“There are more zebra fish on campus than students,” Sara Swinson, a UO undergraduate analysis assistant specializing in undiagnosed illnesses, stated. 

Researchers like Swinson use zebrafish to conduct genetic analysis because of the animal’s proximity to people. 

“The zebrafish shares a large fraction of the same genes that humans have and almost all of the same bodily systems,” Monte Westerfield, who has been finding out zebrafish at UO for over 40 years, stated. “You can take a zebrafish, just like you can take a mouse, for example, and make a model of a human disease by making mutations in genes and then studying the pathophysiology of that disease.”

Zebrafish have been found to be a super mannequin organism by UO professor George Streisinger. His findings, printed in a 1981 paper, established zebrafish as a cornerstone in genetic analysis and UO as a number one power within the discipline.

Streisinger’s analysis additionally impressed Westerfield to review zebrafish, significantly as a mannequin for Usher syndrome — a degenerative genetic dysfunction that causes listening to loss and visible impairment. Zebrafish assist researchers perceive the syndrome’s growth and collect knowledge for potential remedies. 

“Zebrafish are also used to help develop therapies for treating humans. They’re a small aquatic animal, so it’s pretty easy to do drug testing. In many cases, you can just add the drug to the water. They’ve been used successfully to develop a number of therapies that are now either in trials or being used to treat human patients,” Westerfield stated. 

But the trail from analysis to precise remedy growth is an extended and, at occasions, irritating one. Once researchers full preclinical work, medical trials have to be authorised by the FDA and funded by pharmaceutical corporations. 

“It is very difficult. There is a huge hurdle in the cost. Another huge hurdle is that you need to have a fairly large pool of patients to provide the data that is required to show during the test whether the treatment is efficacious or not,” Westerfield stated. “So altogether those things add up to years. There are years of a gap there between the basic primary discoveries and being able to get into a trial. It’s pretty frustrating to the patients and the families. But still you have to do the work.”

Westerfield has seen how success rewards dedication. Over the final 20 years, rising curiosity and group of the Usher syndrome group has developed affected person databases and funded analysis. In the Netherlands, a medical trial is underway to develop therapies for a subset of affected Usher sufferers. 

These are the wins that encourage researchers to descend into the bowels of Huestis Hall every day to work quietly amongst nice cabinets of zebrafish.

“Knowing that it is benefiting at least one specific person, and potentially more, is really inspiring,” Swinson stated. “It feels real. It’s tangible. I’m not just looking at these little fish under the microscope — this actually means something to at least one person.”