A fruit fly model of STAC3 disorder
Ava Grace Cummings · Smithfield, North Carolina
Second Place ($175,000) · Regeneron Science Talent Search · 2025
A Drosophila model of STAC3 disorder — also called Native American myopathy, a rare inherited muscle disease — used to test the common nettle herb alone and combined with the experimental drug Tirasemtiv.
Both adult flies and larvae showed improved movement under treatment.
Rare diseases have no model organisms waiting for you and no commercial interest funding the search. Building the model and testing candidate treatments in the same project is the whole pipeline in one.
- Drosophila disease model construction
- Single-compound and combination treatment
- Larval and adult movement assays
- Genotype and phenotype comparison
- Rare-disease work is wide open precisely because it is unprofitable
- Testing a compound alone and in combination is two experiments for barely more work than one
- Measure the phenotype in more than one life stage when the organism lets you
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