OUR SERVICES

“Zebrafish Centre For Drug Discovery” was founded at CREM Co – a Mississauga based R&D and CRO under Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) compliance – to provide services to Biotech/Pharma/cosmetics companies, federal agencies, and provincial government labs. This facility also supports clinical investigators with no research labs.

Zebrafish is ranked by U.S National Institute of Health (NIH) as the third most important experimental organism after human.

There are several advantages of using zebrafish embryos/larvae as an animal model:

1) It is more similar to human, compared with cell culture system and it can bridge the gap between in-vitro and animal studies.

2) Zebrafish share 70% of the same genes with humans, and 84% of disease-associated genes of humans have a zebrafish ortholog.

3) The transparent nature of zebrafish embryos/larvae allows the ready examination of their internal structures and functions directly.

4) The relatively short generation time of zebrafish can yield experimental results in 6 days or less while keeping the costs low.

5) Each zebrafish embryos/larvae can readily fit into a single well of a multi-well plate (6- to 384-wells). Therefore, high throughput screening with small amounts of each compound can be performed.

Overall, screening using zebrafish provides a fast and predictive way to make the preclinical research shorter and more reliable.

Current Services:

1. CREM Co Zebrafish Centre For Drug Discovery can perform Acute toxicity, Teratotoxicity (Developmental toxicity), Neurotoxicity, Cardiotoxicity, and Multi-toxicity assays under GLP. Several SOPs have been developed following OECD 236 guideline with some modification to make them customized.
2. Several disease models are available (customizable, if needed) for phenotyping and modeling of human disorders to perform drug efficacy assays. Some examples are Parkinson/Alzheimer, Intracerebral Hemorrhage (ICH)/Brain Microbleeds (BMB), Epilepsy, Stress, Anxiety etc.

3. Testing different compound’s safety and efficacy to develop cosmetics can be performed on zebrafish larvae as using animals is not allowed in cosmetics industry. Zebrafish testing provides a quick and cost-effective way to assay candidate compounds before safety and efficacy assessment on human. Several assays are developed with application in cosmetics industry. Other than cosmetics toxicity assays, methods are available to develop cosmetics such as skin lightening agents, anti-oxidants etc.

CREM Co provides free consultation to biotech/pharma/cosmetics industry as well as preclinical and clinical principal investigators. Please contact us to discuss about performing your projects.