One of the gold standards in cancer care is the patient-derived xenograft (PDX) mouse. These personalized avatars are used to test how a patient’s particular cancer might progress and respond to different therapies. But it takes time to create mice—time patients don’t always have.

Alternative animal options are emerging—ones that are cheaper to work with, faster to grow, and offer greater scale than mice: zebrafish and fruit flies. Primary tumor samples can be engrafted into both larval and adult zebrafish, and increasingly complex mutation profiles can be engineered in fish and in flies that mirror the mutations founds in particular patients. Our April Technology Feature explores the possibility of new avatar armies for personalized cancer medicine.

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