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Zebrafish may be key to early detection of childhood leukemia, one of the most common blood cancers. It suppresses the production of normal blood cells and other blood-forming organs which increase the production of immature or abnormal leukocytes.

The new research revealed that zebrafish can identify the genetic and environmental factors of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The new research has been funded by Kids Without Cancer organization and a non-profit group of parents of a cancer patient from the Children's Hospital of Michigan. The Wayne State University School of Medicine has been committed to funding $356,000 for researchers.

Researchers used zebrafish as a model for childhood leukemia that can help scientists to understand the leukemia treatment resistance and may improve therapeutic strategies. The zebrafish is a vertebrate organism which has unique strengths for efficient transgenesis, transplantation and precise genome editing which led to exquisite details of leukemic initiation, progression, and the regression.

Zebrafish is the simplest way to determine the hematopoiesis which begins around the endothelial cells that cue to rise to hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). The HSCs subsequently give all hematopoietic lineages throughout the life of the fish which make the vertebrate a good model.

The leukemia modeling generated zebrafish in showing the mechanisms of the T-ALL cells and the discovering of the NOTCH1. Leukemia transplantations are the important methods for the pathophysiology of cancer. It gives scientists the idea on how the human leukemia cells lines to generate and efficacy and toxicity to other cells.

Zebrafishes are useful in contributing the research on how to determine the tumorigenesis and treatment of childhood leukemia. Nevertheless, the evolutionary distance between the zebra fishes and humans valid mammalian models which requires a further validation in the clinical development.

Despite the limitations, zebrafish genome pose has a useful role in the gene inactivation studies and antibody production due to modification of glycosylation proteins.