Lampire is participating in a multi-pharma consortium whose goal is to develop a harmonized zebrafish developmental toxicity assay. A Progress Report on phase I of their efforts has been published in Reproductive Toxicology
Reference:
Gustafson, A.-L., Stedman, D.B., Ball, J., Hillegass, J.M., Flood, A., Zhang, C.X., Panzica-Kelly, J., Cao, J., Coburn, A., Enright, B.P., Tornesi, M.B., Hetheridge, M., and Augustine-Rauch, K.A. Inter-laboratory assessment of a harmonized zebrafish developmental toxicology assay - Progress report on phase I. Reproductive Toxicology 33(2): 155-164.
Abstract:
This report provides a progress update of a consortium effort to develop a harmonized zebrafish developmental toxicity assay. Twenty non-proprietary compounds (10 animal teratogens and 10 animal non-teratogens) were evaluated blinded in 4 laboratories. Zebrafish embryos from pond-derived and cultivated strain wild types were exposed to the test compounds for 5 days and subsequently evaluated for lethality and morphological changes. Each of the testing laboratories achieved similar overall concordance to the animal data (60-70%). Subsequent optimization procedures to improve the overall concordance focused on compound formulation and test concentration adjustments, chorion permeation and number of replicates. These optimized procedures were integrated into a revised protocol and all compounds were retested in one lab using embryos from pond-derived zebrafish and achieved 85% total concordance. To further assess assay performance, a study of additional compounds is currently in progress at two laboratories using embryos from pond-derived and cultivated-strain wild type zebrafish.