On the sixth floor of a brick building on the BU Medical Campus, at the end of a long, brightly lit corridor, stands a locked door. The door opens into a room with a cement floor and dozens of metal shelves holding scientific treasure: aquarium tanks filled with squiggling zebrafish. Derek Walsh, who oversees the facility, says there are 15,000 to 20,000 fish swimming in the tanks.

Each adult fish is about an inch long, silver with black stripes, just like the kind you’d see at a pet store. A few look different, though. There are 10-day-old babies drifting through the water like specks of dust, and milky mutants called “Casper,” so transparent that you can see their ovaries lumpy with eggs. One tank, labeled “Fli1:GFP,” holds fish whose blood vessels glow green under UV light. These marvelous mutants, and others, are under the charge of Hui Feng, director of BU’s Zebrafish Genetics & Cancer Therapeutics Lab, and they may hold clues to treating breast cancer.

Although it might seem odd to study breast cancer in an animal with no breasts, zebrafish do have lungs, hearts, brains, eyes, and blood vessels that respond to cancer cells much as human vasculature does. Also, since scientists have used zebrafish to model disease for decades, their genetics are well-understood and easily manipulated. And finally—especially useful for studying cancer—the fish are transparent during development, and mutants like Casper are transparent as adults, so scientists can easily monitor tumor growth and metastasis.

“This is part of the genius of Hui Feng,” says David Farb, a School of Medicine professor and chair of pharmacology and experimental therapeutics. “The zebrafish can model human systems, and using them allows her to do pharmacological and genetics work quickly and relatively cheaply.”

Feng’s strategy is to combine observations and experiments in zebrafish with tests in human cells and analysis of human cancer genome databases. By linking all three approaches, she hopes to pinpoint new drug targets and potential therapies for breast cancer.

“If we find something in the fish, we go to the human patient cancer cell and ask: is this true for human cancer or not?” says Feng, a MED assistant professor of pharmacology and medicine. “If everything we find is true for fish, but not true in humans, nobody cares.”

Read the full story on BU Today