Scientists in Cambridge have been awarded more than £500,000 to study fruit flies in a bid to find a new treatment for Alzheimer’s. The flies will be used as a model to study the genes involved in the development of the disease in humans. The team hopes that identifying diseased genes in the flies will help accelerate the design of new drugs. A spokesman said the pursuit of new drugs has increased because Alzheimer’s has become more common. Although fruit flies have been used in genetics for 100 years, the University of Cambridge group claim to be one of the first in the world to have developed a fruit fly model reproducing aspects of Alzheimer’s.
