This volume brings together a series of review articles that highlight new advances in using the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, to study a wide range of cancer-related topics. Building on the foundation of Volume I, the articles demonstrate how research in Drosophila continues to uncover important developmental, cellular, and molecular mechanisms underlying tumor growth, progression, and systemic interactions.
Readers will appreciate how the fly’s simple genetics and powerful experimental tools make it a flexible and effective model for studying cancer. Drosophila offers unique opportunities to answer key questions about how uncontrolled cell proliferation begins and progresses into cancer—questions that can be very difficult to explore in other systems.
This book is a valuable resource for researchers interested in using the Drosophila model to better understand cancer biology and to help find new strategies to combat this disease.
Chapter
1. Unveiling the Tumor Suppressors: Insights from Drosophila.-
Chapter
2. Notch signaling in Drosophila tumor models.
Chapter
3.
Non-autonomous Regulation of Tumor Growth.
Chapter
4. Transcriptional
Regulation of Lipid Metabolism by Wnt Signaling and Hox Protein Cues. -
Chapter
5. The power of Drosophila in Modeling Cancer Cachexia.
Chapter
6.
Drosophila Intestine as a Model to Study Tumors.
Chapter
7. Host-microbe
Interactions in Drosophila Cancer.
Chapter
8. Drosophila as a Model for
Metastasis.
Chapter
9. Epigenetic regulation in Drosophila Tumor Models.-
Chapter
10. From the Making of a neural lineage to the Making of a Tumor:
Lessons from the simple Drosophila Brain.
Chapter
11. Drosophila
Melanogaster as a Model System for Human Glioblastoma.
Chapter
12.
Translationally Controlled Tumor Protein (Tctp) and Growth Regulation in the
Drosophila model.
Chapter
13. Modelling Cancer in Drosophila: Exploration to
Personalised Medicine.
Chapter
14. SVC112; from hummingbirds to Head and
Neck Cancer.
Wu-Min Deng
After earning a PhD in developmental biology from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland, UK), following earlier studies at Sichuan University and the Shanghai Institute of Cell Biology in China, Wu-Min Deng conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Washington (Seattle, WA), where he explored developmental mechanisms in the Drosophila ovary. In 2003, he launched his independent laboratory at Florida State University (Tallahassee, FL), focusing on Notch signaling, cell competition, and tumorigenesis in flies. In 2019, his group moved to Tulane University School of Medicine (New Orleans, LA), where he currently holds the Gerald & Flora Jo Mansfield Piltz Endowed Professorship in Cancer Research. Wu-Min edited the first volume of Drosophila Model in Cancer and co-founded the Fly Bayou research network. In 2025, he was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). His lab uses Drosophila to investigate tumor initiation, progression, and interactions between tumors and host tissues.
Cayetano González
After completing a PhD on fly genetics in the laboratory of Pedro Ripoll at the Centre for Molecular Biology (CBM, Madrid, Spain), Cayetano González moved to David Glover's lab in the UK, first as a postdoc at Imperial College in London and later as a CRC Joint Principal Investigator at University of Dundee. In 1994, he took his first independent position, as a Group Leader at EMBL (Heidelberg, Germany). After the customary nine-year period at EMBL, his laboratory moved to the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas (CNIO, Madrid, Spain). In 2004 he moved to his present post as ICREA Research Professor at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) where he leads the Cell Division Group. In 2007 he was elected to full membership of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO). The Gonzalez's lab uses Drosophila to investigate the molecular and cell biological mechanisms that drive cell proliferation and malignant growth.
