In vivo drug screening on C. elegans and zebrafish using dose response plots and automated tracking programs

Abstract

In vivo drug testing is an expensive and rigorous process where model organisms can offer significant advantages prior to clinical trials. In vivo testing can reveal any deficiencies in the safety and efficacy of chemicals or drugs at the pre-clinical stage of drug development. Model organisms such as C. elegans and zebrafish offer the design flexibility and experimental guidance at the pre-clinical stage in laboratory settings The drug screening protocol is well-established for these model organisms. In this article, we review the protocols for drug screening of new and existing chemicals using model organisms, methods of measuring end points of experiments, and automation tools to plot and characterize the dose response of the drugs. A number of engineering design and automation tools are available to design the microfluidic chips, automation electronics, and worm tracking algorithms which have been commercialized for several applications. We discuss the performance and parameters defining the drug screening process using the dose response.  In addition, we discuss the limitations of simplifying the drug screening process using model organisms, such as underestimating the biological complexities of nature, temporal variations in drug effects, and small variability in the experiments which may hinder the transition to clinical trials.