Table 1.

Zebrafish in cancer modeling.

	Benefits			Limitations
Translational relevance: similarities between humans and zebrafish	Largely conserved development and signaling pathways	Function of innate and adaptive immune cells is highly conserved	Over 80% of human disease-related genes present	Whole-genome duplication (more than one ortholog for some human genes) may interfere with genetic studies
Xenograft models [79,81,84]	Can be generated from human, mouse, or zebrafish tumors	No rejection due to immature adaptive immune system in larvae	Recapitulates parental tumor behaviors including proliferation, survival, invasion, and dissemination	Molecular interactions between transplanted human or mouse tumors and zebrafish cells unclear
Genetically engineered zebrafish models (GEZMs) [82,85,86]	Easy genetic manipulation—injection into one-cell-stage larvae possible	Fast development	Comparable histology to human cancers	Tumor initiation and progression studies hindered by lack of a functional adaptive immune system in early-stage models
Drug studies	Easy, cost-effective, and high scalability	Ease of imaging and high-throughput screening with transparent larvae	High degree of conservation of metabolic enzymes between human and zebrafish larvae	Pharmacokinetic processes still unclear