Building Fruit Fly Avatars in the Search for Personalized Drug Therapies for Cancer—Laura Towart—My Personal Therapeutics and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

As the CEO and founder of My Personal Therapeutics and a biotech aficionado, Laura Towart’s passion is personalized medicine, which is an area of research she’s been working on for well over a decade. For the past seven years, she’s been working with the Mount Sinai Medical Center on the Personal Discovery Process (PDP), a technology that uses “fruit fly avatars” in the study of certain malignant tumors and the testing of new, best-fit drug therapies for treating them.

Towart explains all the details of this process, which begins by sequencing a patient’s tumor biopsy, microinjecting genetic mutations into fruit flies, and then carrying out large-scale high-throughput drug screening to identify new combinations of drugs for patients. Using robotics, they screen 1,500 FDA-approved drugs in combinations of up to three—meaning they screen tens of thousands of drug combinations before making human treatment recommendations.

On today’s episode, Towart discusses the ins and outs of this new method, including the limitations and challenges it presents, the benefits of using a fly model, and where their work is headed in the near future. Click play and check out mypersonaltherapeutics.com to learn more.