Kasai Yumi, Cagan Ross
Department of Genetics & Genomic Sciences, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, One Gustave L Levy Place, NY 10029-6574, USA.
Per Med. 2010 Nov;7(6):621-632. doi: 10.2217/pme.10.65.
The goal of personalized medicine is to treat each patient with the best drug: optimal therapeutic benefit with minimal side effects. The genomic revolution is rapidly identifying the genetic contribution to the diseased state as well as its contribution to drug efficacy and toxicity. The ability to perform genome-wide studies has led to an overwhelming number of candidate genes and/or their associated variants; however, understanding which are of therapeutic importance is becoming the greatest unmet need in the personalized medicine field. A related issue is the need to improve our methods of identifying and characterizing therapeutic drugs in the context of the complex genomic landscape of the intact body. Drosophila have proven to be a powerful tool for understanding the basic biological mechanisms of human development. This article will review Drosophila as a whole animal tool for gene and drug discovery. We will examine how Drosophila can be used to both sort through the myriad of hits coming from human genome-wide scans and to dramatically improve the early steps in pharmaceutical drug development.
实现最大治疗效益并将副作用降至最低。基因组革命正在迅速确定基因对疾病状态的影响，以及对药物疗效和毒性的影响。进行全基因组研究的能力已经产生了大量的候选基因和/或其相关变体；然而，了解哪些具有治疗重要性正成为个性化医疗领域最大的未满足需求。一个相关问题是，需要改进我们在完整机体复杂的基因组背景下识别和表征治疗药物的方法。果蝇已被证明是理解人类发育基本生物学机制的有力工具。本文将综述果蝇作为用于基因和药物发现的整体动物工具的情况。我们将研究果蝇如何用于筛选来自人类全基因组扫描的大量结果，并显著改进药物研发的早期步骤。
