Based in Northern California, Brian Frenzel is a longtime new product discovery and development executive in the life sciences industry. Brian Frenzel currently serves as CEO of Tosk, Inc. a company that utilizes fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) to discover new cancer drugs.
While fruit flies have an outward appearance that scarcely resembles humans, roughly 60 percent of fly genes can also be found in humans in a similar form with similar function. If you consider genes that cause disease, 75% of the genes that cause disease in humans can be found in Drosophila, and that percentage increases to 90% if you look at genes that can trigger cancer.
At the same time, it is much easier to analyze the fruit fly genome than that of a human, since there are only eight chromosomes in the fly compared to 46 chromosomes in humans and 40 in mice. Consequently, the fly genome was the first to be fully mapped, accomplished in 2000.
Equally importantly for pharmaceutical research, flies are a very inexpensive whole animal discovery tool. Many hundreds of drug candidates can be tested in Drosophila at the same cost as a single test in a rodent.
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