Brian Frenzel is a pharmaceutical industry veteran with decades of experience in drug discovery and development and building early-stage life science companies. During his career, he has focused on new products that address unmet medical needs in such diverse fields as infectious diseases; preterm labor; dysfunctional uterine bleeding; neurodegenerative diseases, including, stroke, Parkinson’s disease, and Alzheimer’s disease; and cancer. At Tosk, Inc., Brian Frenzel has led efforts to harness Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly, to discover drugs to treat cancer.
Scientists have used the fruit fly for genetic research since the early 20th century. Six Nobel Prizes have been awarded for research using fruit flies. The fruit fly is a useful tool for the study of human diseases, since many fly genes are similar to those in humans, and fly organ systems play analogous roles to those in humans. With a short life cycle of about 25 days and their ease of feeding and care, flies are a very cost-effective animal in which to study diseases and develop treatments. Tosk Inc. has developed two new drug discovery models that use fruit flies. In the first, known as the Side Effect Fly™, researchers administer drugs with serious, adverse side effects to fruit flies to identify treatments that selectively block those side effects. The second method, known as the Genetically Modified Fly™, uses fruit flies that are genetically modified to include a human disease-causing gene in their makeup. These flies are then used to screen for treatments that selectively block the activity of the human disease gene.
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AuthorAt Genelabs Technologies in the 1980’s, Brian Frenzel served on the front lines in the war on HIV/AIDS and championed projects to identify and diagnose new hepatitis viruses. Archives
June 2020
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