In Vivo Chemical Screening for Modulators of Hematopoiesis and Hematological Diseases.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Hematology Volume 2012, Article ID 851674, 12 pages doi:10.1155/2012/851674 Review Article In Vivo Chemical Screening for Modulators of Hematopoiesis and Hematological Diseases Yiyun Zhang1, 2 and J.-R. Joanna Yeh1, 2 1 Cardiovascular Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA 02129, USA 2 Department of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA Correspondence should be addressed to J.-R. Joanna Yeh, jyeh1@ Received 22 February 2012; Accepted 26 April 2012 Academic Editor: Jason Berman Copyright © 2012 Y. Zhang and J.-R. J. Yeh. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In vivo chemical screening is a broadly applicable approach not only for dissecting genetic pathways governing hematopoiesis and hematological diseases, but also for finding critical components in those pathways that may be pharmacologically modulated. Both high-throughput chemical screening and facile detection of blood-cell-related phenotypes are feasible in embryonic/larval zebrafish. Two recent studies utilizing phenotypic chemical screens in zebrafish have identified several compounds that promote hematopoietic stem cell formation and reverse the hematopoietic phenotypes of a leukemia oncogene, respectively. These studies illustrate efficient drug discovery processes in zebrafish and reveal novel biological roles of prostaglandin E2 in hematopoietic and leukemia stem cells. Furthermore, the compounds discovered in zebrafish screens have become promising therapeutic candidates against leukemia and included in a clinical trial for enhancing hematopoie