Novel compounds for the treatment of Duchenne muscular dystrophy: emerging therapeutic agents

Recent advances using zebrafish animal models for muscle disease drug discovery

INTRODUCTION

Animal models have enabled great progress in the discovery and understanding of pharmacological approaches for treating muscle diseases like Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

AREAS COVERED

With this article, the author provides the reader with a description of the zebrafish animal model, which has been employed to identify and study pharmacological approaches to muscle disease. In particular, the author focuses on how both large-scale chemical screens and targeted drug treatment studies have established zebrafish as an important model for muscle disease drug discovery.

EXPERT OPINION

There are a number of opportunities arising for the use of zebrafish models for further developing pharmacological approaches to muscle diseases, including studying drug combination therapies and utilizing genome editing to engineer zebrafish muscle disease models. It is the author's particular belief that the availability of a wide range of zebrafish transgenic strains for labeling immune cell types, combined with live imaging and drug treatment of muscle disease models, should allow for new elegant studies demonstrating how pharmacological approaches might influence inflammation and the immune response in muscle disease.