Writing the book of cancer knowledge
The goal of cancer treatment is to match the right drug to the right target in the right patient. But before such “personalized” drugs can be developed, more knowledge is needed about specific genomic alterations in cancers and their sensitivity to potential therapeutic agents. Now an academic-industry collaboration is releasing the first results from a new and freely available resource that marries deeply detailed cancer genome data with predictors of drug response, information that could lead to refinements in cancer clinical trials and future treatments. The Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia (CCLE), authored by scientists at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Harvard-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Foundation, and the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, is described in the March 29 issue of the journal Nature. In a proof of principle, the researchers also report that genomic predictors of drug sensitivity revealed three novel candidate biomarkers...