Mione Lab

The use of the zebrafish to study cancer is an emerging field, and my laboratory has developed systems that allow to visualize oncogenic transformation of cells in different organs and tissues of transparent zebrafish larvae through the use of GFP-tagged oncogenes. Briefly, we use genetic systems for conditional and mosaic expression of oncogenes recapitulating the occurrence of somatic mutations in sporadic cancer. These systems also allow us to precisely target transformed cells with different genes to study the role of their products in transformation. Using this approach, we have studied the biology of cancer initiating cells in their native environment in models of melanoma (Santoriello et al., 2010) and glioblastoma (Mione et al., in preparation), and identified cellular and extracellular factors that allow them to thrive and establish cancer. These systems are also ideal to visualize and manipulate the early immune responses to cancer cells in a live vertebrate organism.