Cancer cell lines evolve in ways that affect how they respond to drugs
Cell lines form the backbone of cancer research. These individual groups of cells, typically collected from patients’ tumor samples and cultured to grow indefinitely in the laboratory, enable everything from basic genetic research to drug discovery. But while scientists have thought that individual cell lines remain genetically uniform even as they continue to grow and divide, they can in fact evolve in ways that dramatically change their responses to drugs, say researchers from the Broad Institute and collaborating institutions. This continuing evolution of cells within cell lines — potentially driven by the laboratory conditions in which they are grown — may help explain why different studies that use the same cell lines often have conflicting results. These findings, reported in Nature, suggest that scientists need to take extra care to ensure that cell line-based models of cancer accurately reflect the tumor they are studying. The research team has released an online tool, Cell STRAINER,...