BOSTON (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- They could be the tiniest heroes in the war against cancer. Transparent fish with human-like genes are allowing scientists to watch the drama of how cancer grows and spreads. It's a revealing look at a disease that impacts close to 1.5 million Americans.
These tanks hold thousands of zebrafish, but if you take a closer look, you'll notice some have lost their stripes.Researchers altered their DNA and created transparent fish all in the name of research.
"Fish have genes that are amazingly similar to humans," Richard Mark White, M.D., Ph.D., an instructor of medical oncology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass., told Ivanhoe.
Dr. White transplanted melanoma into the see-through fish. He now watches how cancer grows and spreads in real time in a living organism.
"Wo we can see the origins of just how a tumor started and how it spread within the body over time, which is pretty analogous as to what happens in a human: It starts small and gets bigger," Dr. White said.
Dr. White says the fish prove there's a pattern to the cancer spread -- important in treating humans since the spread of cancer is what kills.
"We're sort of realizing pretty quickly that when tumors cells spread, they do it in a pretty organized way," he said. "It's really an amazing picture of how tumors grow and spread in a very rapid time. In a way, you could never do it in an animal or, obviously, in a human."
Understanding that organized way could help patients like Heather Fraelick get better treatment to stop cancer from spreading. At 25 she discovered melanoma on her arm and later had a recurrence.
"I was scared to find out the results from my surgery, because I knew that if the melanoma had traveled, my odds weren't good for survival," Fraelick told Ivanhoe.
The goal -- improve those odds and find new treatments, using fish as a window into the body's fight against cancer.
The researchers are also using the fish to learn how to make stem cell transplants safer. Humans and zebrafish share about 80 percent of the same genes.
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Fishing for a Cancer Cure
interview with Dr. White
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