Fruit Flies Aid Efforts to Develop Personalized Cancer Treatments

              People have always been wondering why type 2 diabetes leads to cancer cells in humans. People with diabetes should suffer fewer tumors, not more of them. So new research on fruit flies, was published in 2013, in the scientific journal Cell, may have finally cracked the long-standing mystery. Scientist who study insects are now turning toward the study of fruit flies. This is because to study tumor cells it is better to do it in a fruit fly then in a petri dish. Fruit flies offer lots of advantages as lab animals. They are tiny, inexpensive to feed, house, and have very short life spans which helps with studying cell samples. Fruit flies and people have similar genes which is why they are good specimens. Thanks to the genomics revolution of the past decade, clinicians can now take a genetic snapshot of a person’s malignant tumor and find out which genes are acting differently than usual. Thanks to modern technology now we can order fruit flies to match a certain genetic code. This will help identify different types of cancer cells.
              It gives me a sense of how biologists are starting to weave together insights from genetics, developmental biology and physiology to create a better picture of what really happens inside a fruit fly or a person. This well then lead to finding treatments for cancer and how to stop them from forming and spreading throughout the body.