Model Organisms in Drug Discovery (PDF)

Fruit flies are "little people with wings" goes the saying in the
scientific community, ever since the completion of the Human Genome
Project and its revelations about the similarity amongst the
genomes of different organisms. It is humbling that most signalling
pathways which "define" humans are conserved in Drosophila, the
common fruit fly.

Feed a fruit fly caffeine and it has trouble falling asleep;
feed it antihistamines and it cannot stay awake. A C. elegans worm
placed on the antidepressant flouxetine has increased serotonin
levels in its tiny brain. Yeast treated with chemotherapeutics stop
their cell division. Removal of a single gene from a mouse or
zebrafish can cause the animals to develop Alzheimer's
disease or heart disease. These organisms are utilized as
surrogates to investigate the function and design of complex human
biological systems.

Advances in bioinformatics, proteomics, automation technologies
and their application to model organism systems now occur on an
industrial scale. The integration of model systems into the drug
discovery process, the speed of the tools, and the in vivo
validation data that these models can provide, will clearly help
definition of disease biology and high-quality target validation.
Enhanced target selection will lead to the more efficacious and
less toxic therapeutic compounds of the future.

Leading experts in the field provide detailed accounts of model
organism research that have impacted on specific therapeutic areas
and they examine state-of-the-art applications of model systems,
describing real life applications and their possible impact in the
future.

This book will be of interest to geneticists, bioinformaticians,
pharmacologists, molecular biologists and people working in the
pharmaceutical industry, particularly genomics.