November 2011 - Marie Curie Initial Training Network for the Institute of Biology
Dr. Annemarie H. Meijer at the Institute of Biology will be coordinator of a new Marie Curie Initial Training Network receiving 3.7 million euro funding from the European Seventh Framework People Programme. The four year project, starting January 2012, is called “FishForPharma: Training Network on Zebrafish Infection Models for Pharmaceutical Screens”.
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Figure: FishForPharma Marie-Curie International training network
- Zebrafish as a Model for Infectious Diseases
Infectious diseases caused by pathogenic micro-organisms are major causes of death, disability, and social and economic disruption for millions of people. During evolution these pathogens have developed intricate strategies to manipulate host defence mechanisms and outwit the immune system. To reduce the burden of infectious diseases it is important to increase understanding of these host-pathogen interaction mechanisms and to develop more effective strategies for drug discovery. The zebrafish holds much promise as a high throughput drug screening model. In the last few years, zebrafish models for studying human pathogens or closely related animal pathogens have emerged at a rapid pace. The fact that zebrafish produce large amounts of embryos, which develop externally and are optically transparent, gives unprecedented possibilities for live imaging of disease processes and is the basis of novel high-throughput drug screening approaches. FishForPharma aims to deliver the proof-of-principle for drug discovery using zebrafish infectious disease models and to increase understanding of host-pathogen interaction mechanisms to identify new drug targets for infectious disease treatment.
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Image: Green fluorescent macrophages in a zebrafish embryo phagocytosing red fluorescent Salmonella typhimurium bacteria (image by Erica Benard)
- High-throughput Drug Screening using Zebrafish Infection Models
The major bottleneck for development of high-throughput antimicrobial drug screens has been that infection models rely on manual injection and handling of zebrafish embryos. This limiting factor has been overcome by a unique automatic injection system that was developed in collaboration between the Institute of Biology and the spin-out company ZF-Screens BV. In a previous EU project, ZF-TOOLS, also coordinated by Annemarie Meijer, this injection robot has been benchmarked for tuberculosis drug screens (Carvalho et al, 2011, PlosOne). In FishForPharma we aim to further develop imaging and analysis tools and to extend the screening technology to other infection models.
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Image: Five-day-old zebrafish larva with green fluorescent blood vessels carrying an infection with red fluorescent Mycobacterium marinum bacteria, which were injected at day 1 using the recently developed injection robot (image by Ralph Carvalho, PlosOne, 2011)
- Marie Curie Training Network
The FishForPharma training network brings together leading European research groups that have pioneered the use of zebrafish infection models and partners from the Biotech and Pharma sectors that aim to commercialize zebrafish tools for biomedical applications. The network will employ 11 PhD students and 3 early-stage postdoctoral researchers in 5 European countries (for more information download the advertisement). Their education programme will include training-through-research in individual projects, secondments at network partner’s research groups, and a variety of local and network-wide courses and workshops. To find the deadlines for the applications, please go to http://ec.europa.eu/euraxess/.
- Network Partners
Institute of Biology, Leiden University, The Netherlands – Dr. Annemarie H. Meijer (Coordinator)
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France – Dr. Georges Lutfalla
Wageningen University, The Netherlands – Dr. Geert F. Wiegertjes
Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), France – Dr. Pierre Boudinot
Agencia Estatal Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC), Spain – Dr. Antonio Figueras
The University of Sheffield, United Kingdom – Dr. Stephen Renshaw
University of Cologne, Germany – Dr. Maria Leptin
Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale (INSERM), France – Dr. Annette Vergunst
ZF-screens BV, The Netherlands – Dr. Ron Dirks
ZF-Biolabs, Spain – Dr. Joaquin Guinea
GlaxoSmithKline Tres Cantos Medicines Development Campus, Spain – Dr. Luis Ballell (Associated partner)
- Contact
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- Links
• Studying Molecular and Cellular BioSciences in Leiden, bachelor’s and master’s
• Institute of Biology Leiden
• Home page of Annemarie Meijer
• Automated zebrafish injection system
• Zebrafish immune cell research
• EURAXESS job portal for application for PhD and postdoc positions
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