{"doi":"10.1101/2020.07.28.225789","title":"Drug Screening with Zebrafish Visual Behavior Identifies Carvedilol as a Potential Treatment for Retinitis Pigmentosa","abstract":"Abstract Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP) is an incurable inherited retinal degeneration affecting approximately 1 in 4,000 individuals globally. The goal of this work was to identify drugs that can help patients suffering from the disease. To accomplish this, we screened drugs on a zebrafish RP model. This model expresses a truncated human rhodopsin transgene ( Tg(rho:Hsa . RH1_Q344X )) causing significant rod degeneration by 7 days post-fertilization (dpf). Consequently, the larvae displayed a deficit in visual motor response (VMR) under scotopic condition. The diminished VMR was leveraged to screen an ENZO SCREEN-WELL® REDOX library since oxidative stress is postulated to play a role in RP progression. Our screening identified a beta-blocker, carvedilol, that ameliorated the deficient VMR of the RP larvae and increased their rod number. Carvedilol can act directly on rods as it affected the adrenergic pathway in a rod-like human Y79 cell line. Since carvedilol is an FDA-approved drug, our findings suggest that carvedilol can potentially be repurposed to treat RP patients. Summary Statement This paper presents the utilization of zebrafish visual behavior, a novel paradigm to screen and identify drugs to treat retinitis pigmentosa, an incurable retinal-degenerative disease.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2020,"id":125221,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":2,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9569,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":571020,"name":"Mee Jung Ko","orcid":"0000-0003-0169-1387","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":571021,"name":"Mengrui Zhang","orcid":"0000-0002-7082-3753","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":331410,"name":"Rui Xie","orcid":"0000-0001-9769-8131","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":571022,"name":"Yongkai Chen","orcid":"0000-0002-5243-8341","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":559273,"name":"Liyun Zhang","orcid":"0000-0002-0814-4872","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":571873,"name":"Rebecca James","orcid":null,"position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":559279,"name":"Jeff S. Mumm","orcid":"0000-0002-2575-287X","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":452822,"name":"Richard M. van Rijn","orcid":"0000-0002-9957-1633","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":331412,"name":"Wenxuan Zhong","orcid":"0000-0001-9006-622X","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":461920,"name":"Chi Pui Pang","orcid":"0000-0002-7764-6382","position":11,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":571023,"name":"Mingzhi Zhang","orcid":"0000-0001-9032-7274","position":12,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":571874,"name":"Motokazu Tsujikawa","orcid":null,"position":14,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":571024,"name":"Yuk Fai Leung","orcid":"0000-0002-8045-1068","position":15,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":571019,"name":"Logan Ganzen","orcid":"0000-0002-2790-8882","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":87,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:15:15.482227Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}