Mel B Feany, MD, PhD

Mel B. Feany, M.D., Ph.D., is a Professor of Pathology, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Feany’s laboratory models human neurodegenerative diseases in Drosophila melanogaster (commonly known as a “fruit fly”)—an organism that can have diseases similar to humans and has a fully sequenced genome. Her laboratory has previously engineered flies to have human forms of tau related to Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease and found them to have human-like symptoms. Feany’s team has subsequently used Drosophila genetics, along with validating experiments in vertebrate model systems (including mice engineered to have these diseases), to identify cellular and molecular pathways mediating neuronal death in Alzheimer’s disease and related neurodegenerative disorders.