Pipping the Scales with Zebrafish

Fish on treadmills? Lisa Truong, PhD, MBA, Oregon State University, discusses the unique ways that they test exposure effects using zebrafish. Co-hosts Anne Chappelle, PhD, and David Faulkner, PhD, also ask her about the benefits of having an MBA as a scientist.About the GuestThe overall goal of Lisa Truong's research program is to utilize the zebrafish model to help build computational predictive toxicity models. Secondarily, she aims to move the field to be less reliant on animal testing and to conduct toxicity-testing based on toxicity pathways. Dr. Truong has a Bachelor’s degree in pre-pharmacy with a minor in chemistry, which provided the foundation to evaluate a structurally diverse class of fluorinated compounds during her Master's studies. Her PhD thesis was focused on developing rapid in vivo assays to investigate structure response relationships using larval and adult zebrafish. Using the methods that Dr. Truong developed, the zebrafish developmental toxicity screen is now fully automated at the Sinnhuber Aquatic Research Laboratory (SARL). During Dr. Truong's postdoctoral training at the US Environmental Protection Agency, she developed systemic toxicity models while working within the then-National Center for Computational Toxicology and L’Oreal. She built numerous models using the high-throughput data generated from over 800 assays and became adept at programming in R and in advanced statistics. More recently, since her recruitment as the Deputy Director of the SARL, Dr. Truong has begun to build robust statistical methods to integrate multi-dimensional phenotypic and expression zebrafish data and has helped to streamline data collection which has further increased the throughput which is critical for this proposal. In summary, for nearly a decade, Dr. Truong has developed advanced zebrafish as a premier model for environmental health sciences research. The research is now at a point to begin mining the data to develop models to prioritize and predict toxicity of chemicals/nanoparticles/mixtures that have insufficient hazard information.Send SOT thoughts on the episodes, ideas for future topics, and more.