154: Treating Huntington's disease

Promising treatments for Huntington's disease identified | Science Blog:

"Preclinical testing strategies such as those we used with fruit flies can result in a great savings of cost and time in developing potential disease treatments," Marsh said. "They can serve to rapidly identify treatment regimens that are very likely to provide effective therapeutic benefit to patients."

In developing these drug combinations, Marsh and Thompson chose compounds that individually have been shown in other fruit-fly tests and in mouse models to suppress neurodegeneration, but each targets different cellular processes.

Yada yada yada. Flies and mice tell us about the functioning of human cells because of common descent. Evolution gives us testable predictions.