Chapter 8. Are Worms the Future of Drug Development?
At first glance, studying C. elegans feeding seems a bit esoteric. I certainly didn’t know that their swallowing frequency is an indicator of age-related health, or that monitoring this behavior is used to study neurophysiology and toxicology (Leung, 2008) for drug development. Shawn Lockery, the CTO and cofounder of NemaMetrix, compares an electropharyngeogram (EPG)—the measurement of pharyngeal pumping as electric activity—to an EKG. “[You could think of an] EKG as just the heart pushing blood around,” he said. “But you can figure out age and health and strength, all the things that are directly correlated to one of [our] most integral organs.”
Turns out, the EPG to EKG analogy is not just a literary turn of phrase. The pharyngeal pumping mechanism in C. elegans is controlled by a set of genes that determine cardiac health in humans. C. elegans possess homologues for up to 80% of human genes (Kaletta, 2006) and, as a result, are widely used as a model organism.
NemaMetrix believes that using C. elegans as an inexpensive, live-animal model can revolutionize (and democratize) the drug development process. But common methods to analyze pumping rates were archaic and cumbersome. Most often, researchers would just record a video ...
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