Fruit flys used for testing drug treatments

Scientists in Scotland have discovered a new technique for studying drug treatments by injecting fruit flies with human and jellyfish genes. The scientists from Brainwave Discovery Limited say this technique will serve as a superior alternative to similar studies in mice for drug treatments that could be used to treat Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. The technique works by isolating genes in the central nervous system responsible for these diseases and then injecting them into a fruit fly embryo along with genes from jellyfish that cause specific regions in the brain to flash blue and green. Once the flies are hatched, scientists study their heads with microscopes searching for blue emissions, once these have been spotted the flies are injected with extremely small doses of the drug treatment and the scientists then look for green flashes which indicate the treatment is working. If the scientists see the green light they can make the experiment more complicated by adding genes to the flies offspring in order to make the drug testing much more sophisticated. If this technique can be proved successful it will save much time and money in testing as it is a much more economical and faster technique than using mice as subjects. This may also accelerate the time needed to get drugs to the public, a process that takes 10 or more years using mice. Also considering that drug testing is the largest cost pharmaceutical companies face, it could increase the amount of drugs tested as many are pushed aside due to cost. I found this article interesting because we have discussed animal research and gene engineering in class and in previous SNBAL assignments, and personally I would find it amazing if we could really use flies to study drug treatments for humans. If this technique proves to work I think it would be mind-blowing how sophisticated the flies genomes would eventually become making it easier for scientists to study all types of situations that could affect drug treatment.

http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/How-this-brainy-fruit-fly.4512978.jp

Riley White
Section 502