The 146th Annual Meeting of the Pharmaceutical Society of Japan (Osaka)

Organizer: Toshiaki Kume (Grad. Sch. Med. Pharm. Sci., Univ. Toyama), Soken Tsuchiya (Grad. Sch. Pharm. Sci., Kumamoto Univ.)

Small fishes such as zebrafish and medaka are vertebrate models that offer convenience and advantages for observation and compound treatment due to characteristics including prolificacy and transparent early embryos, rapid development outside the mother's body. These characteristics and high extrapolation potential to humans, concordance with animal welfare principles have been recognized, momentum for drug discovery research utilizing small fishes has been growing in recent years, not only in academia but also in industry. However, their recognition and prevalence cannot yet be considered high in the field of pharmaceutical sciences. Therefore, this symposium aims to widely share the usefulness of small fishes in drug discovery by introducing cutting-edge researches using small fishes from both academia and industry. Concretely, we will present the latest research findings including (i) technologies and case studies for in vivo phenotype-based drug screening and (ii) elucidating mechanisms of life phenomena and diseases using genome editing and transgenic approaches, disease models, (iii) safety/toxicity evaluations, and would like to discuss the drug discovery paradigm utilizing small fishes.