ABOVE: ISTOCK, ANDREI STANESCU
A terminally ill colon cancer patient has received a bespoke chemotherapy recipe following drug screens in Drosophila engineered to mimic the complexity of the man’s disease, according to a paper in Science Advances today (May 22). The drug combination significantly shrunk the patient’s tumors, which remained small for several months, paving the way for further investigations into such genetically personalized fly models.
“It is an exciting study. Nothing like this has been done before,” says cancer and Drosophila expert Tin Tin Su of the University of Colorado who was not involved in the work. “Whether the approach will work, how applicable it is, that of course remains to be seen—it’s one patient. But you’ve got to start somewhere and this is an exciting start.”
Despite immense efforts to develop new and better chemotherapy drugs, “one of the key challenges has been that therapeutics that work very ...
