The use of Drosophila melanogaster to identify novel therapeutic agents for Alzheimer’s disease

About the Project

Since 2003, our understanding of the causes of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) have improved considerably, however, in that time only one new drug treatment has been approved. The traditional animal of choice when modelling AD has been the mouse and although mouse models have proved to be invaluable, questions have been increasingly raised about the validity of using mouse models alone for AD drug discovery, particularly in light of the very high failure rate of clinical trials. We propose to use another AD model, the fruit fly, as an additional streamlining step in the drug development pipeline. This will, (1) address and improve the lack of translation between preclinical and clinical trials, and (2) lead to more informative and selective future mouse studies.

This project offers a PhD student the exciting opportunity to use the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) as a model for AD, and to integrate sophisticated genetic and imaging techniques to identify novel drug treatments for this disease.

This project offers the student a fantastic opportunity to learn state-of-the-art techniques, including:

• Sophisticated fly genetics
• Live high-resolution imaging using confocal microscopy
• Fly pupal mounting and dissections
• Immunohistochemistry
• Pre-clinical drug evaluation
• Use of specialised imaging software
• A wide variety of molecular biology techniques
• Data analysis
• Statistical analysis and numeracy skills