They could be the tiniest heroes in the war against cancer. Transparent fish with human-like genes are allowing scientists to solve the mystery of how cancer grows and spreads.
Tanks at Harvard Medical School hold thousands of zebra fish. Researchers altered their DNA and created transparent fish for research.
"Fish have genes that are amazingly similar to human genes," said Dr. Richard Mark White, PhD, Harvard Medical School.
White transplanted melanoma into the see-through fish. He now watches how cancer grows and spreads in real time.
"So we can see the origins of just how a tumor started and how it spreads within the body over time, which is pretty analogous as to what happens in a human: It starts small and gets bigger," said White.
White says the fish prove there's a pattern to cancer. That's important since it's the spread of cancer that kills.
"We're sort of realizing pretty quickly that when tumors cells spread, they do it on a pretty organized way," said White. "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."
That research could help patients like Heather Fraelick get better treatment. 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," said Fraelick.
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 zebra fish share about 80 percent of the same genes.
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