yeast is used as a model organism for studying human genes that are homologous to the model organism but how is the overexpression measured in the species.
Gaining insight into the role of human cancer genes is possible by expressing them in other species, such as yeast. Genes, proteins and pathways are highly conserved between yeast and humans and actively dividing yeast cells resemble human cancer cells for their preference of glycolysis. In the absence of obvious genes homologues, yeast can represent a "clean room" to study novel function of human cancer regulators.
As a preliminary screening, it is also possible to evaluate the effect of selected drugs on yeast cells expressing human genes before validation in more relevant systems.
As Nicoletta said, model organisms (such as yeast) could be very useful to study gene function in a more "simple" context. Obviously, the role of a human oncogene in several steps of tumorigenesis progression could be studied in multicellular organisms only: the contribution in EMT or metastatization, for instance, could not be addressed in yeast or in C.elegans. But the use of model organisms could really provide new insights in the study of molecular pathways.
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