Drosophila for drug discovery: useful tool or wishful thinking?

"In the quest for new effective drugs there is the push for faster ways to identify active lead compounds to develop and validate in drug discovery pipelines. Cell culture-based screens are easy to run and can be both standardized and automated to perform efficient high-throughput screens. Combined with the large available compound libraries, they can be useful to identify leads. However, many of such leads have been found to fail in the subsequent validation steps, where system complexity increases, with many compounds revealing as toxic to a multicellular organism or unable to penetrate the target organs. Flies are increasingly and successfully being used for pharmacological studies..."