We currently face a variety of social issues, including an aging population, an increase in lifestyle-related diseases, and rising healthcare costs. However, the development of new drugs is hindered by the tremendous expense, time, and effort required. Conventional drug development methods that use cultured cells, mice, and patient samples make it challenging to achieve an efficient drug discovery process. As an alternative, we propose the use of Drosophila (fruit flies), which are easy, fast, and inexpensive to raise and breed, pose no ethical issues, and have similar genes and drug responses to mammals. Our goal is to establish a platform for Drosophila-based drug screening to identify lead compounds for various diseases, such as cancer, heart disease, stroke, rheumatism, and diabetes.
References
- M. Sonoshita, A. P. Scopton, P. M. U. Ung, M. A. Murray, L. Silber, A. Y. Maldonado, A. Real, A. Schlessinger, R. L. Cagan, and A. C. Dar, "A whole-animal platform to advance a clinical kinase inhibitor into new disease space", Nature Chemical Biology 14, 291 (2018)
- P. M. U. Ung, M. Sonoshita, A. P. Scopton, A. C. Dar, R. L. Cagan, and A. Schlessinger, "Integrated computational and Drosophila cancer model platform captures previously unappreciated chemicals perturbing a kinase network", PLOS Computational Biology 15, e1006878 (2019)
Drosophila-based drug discovery
- Field leader: Jorgen Walker Peterson
- Funding: JST START, AMED Drug Discovery & Development
- Collaboration: Serendipity Lab, Masahiro Sonoshita (Hokkaido University), Tamiki Komatsuzaki (Hokkaido University), Ross Cagan (University of Glasgow)