In the basement of UO’s Huestis Hall is a library full of fish. Small, stripy blue zebrafish swim 30 to a container in the warm underground laboratory. Their thin, book-shaped tanks stack into shelves that continue for rows upon rows.
“There are more zebra fish on campus than students,” Sara Swinson, a UO undergraduate research assistant specializing in undiagnosed diseases, said.
Researchers like Swinson use zebrafish to conduct genetic research due to the animal’s proximity to humans.
“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 studying zebrafish at UO for over 40 years, said. “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 were discovered to be an ideal model organism by UO professor George Streisinger. His findings, published in a 1981 paper, established zebrafish as a cornerstone in genetic research and UO as a leading force in the field.
Streisinger’s research also inspired Westerfield to study zebrafish, particularly as a model for Usher syndrome — a degenerative genetic disorder that causes hearing loss and visual impairment. Zebrafish help researchers understand the syndrome’s development and gather data for potential treatments.
“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 said.
But the path from research to actual therapy development is a long and, at times, frustrating one. Once researchers complete preclinical work, clinical trials must be approved by the FDA and funded by pharmaceutical companies.
“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 said. “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 last 20 years, increasing interest and organization of the Usher syndrome community has developed patient databases and funded research. In the Netherlands, a clinical trial is underway to develop therapies for a subset of affected Usher patients.
These are the wins that motivate researchers to descend into the bowels of Huestis Hall each day to work quietly among great shelves of zebrafish.
“Knowing that it is benefiting at least one specific person, and potentially more, is really inspiring,” Swinson said. “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.”
