Using the fruit fly to study Alzheimer’s disease
Project summary: One of the major problems with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the lack of available effective treatments. Usually, for the study of most human diseases, including AD, the traditional animal of choice has been the mouse. However, questions have been increasingly raised about the validity of these mouse models, particularly in the light of the very high failure rate of clinical trials of AD therapies. Our aim is to use another AD model, the fruit fly, as an additional step in the drug development pipeline, to address and improve the lack of translation between preclinical and clinical trials.
The hypothesis underlying this proposal is that fruit flies have significant potential to accelerate the identification of new drugs that improve on current AD treatments. Nearly 75% of human disease-causing genes are also present in the fly, which has led to the fly being increasingly used as a model to study human disease, in particular for neurodegenerative disorders, such as AD. Using high resolution imaging of the fly brain, we will combine the power of fly genetics with state-of-the-art cell biology to identify and characterise new drugs for AD, for which, despite extensive investigation, effective treatments remain elusive.
The specific aim for the summer student project is to develop an assay to image both wild-type and AD fly brains, to determine the effect on neuronal morphology. This work will then be taken forward by testing whether specific drug treatments improve neuronal defects and/or survival in these AD models. Our ultimate aim is to develop a high-throughput screening platform for new drug treatments, to identify those that reduce neurodegeneration within the brains of fly AD models.
Training: Training in all techniques will be carried out by members of the lab. No prior knowledge of these techniques, or in the use of Drosophila melanogaster, is required.