Question: what other things have fruit flies help cure?

Joanne Sharpe answered on 1 Jun 2018:

Fruit flies can be used to help understand many human diseases from cancer to kidney stones! 70% of human disease causing genes are shared by the fruit fly, meaning they are extremely useful for studying diseases that are caused by mistakes in our DNA such as Huntington’s Disease and types of cancer. Flies have been used to study cancer since 1967 when they were used to discover the first tumour suppressor gene (a gene that protects against cells turning cancerous). As flies have a short lifespan compared to humans, they are also ideal to study diseases that affect older people, such as Parkinson’s Disease and different types of dementia.

As well as helping us to understand all these different types of diseases, which is important in finding a cure, flies can be used to test new drugs. It is hard to know if a new drug will be effective in treating a disease, and you can’t go trying them all out on humans or even mice willy-nilly. That is why flies are so useful – hundreds of drugs can be tested on flies and this shows us very quickly which ones are able to improve the condition. These can then be taken into more expensive and long term studies in mice, and eventually trialled in humans.