Cancer Cell Line Assays: You Won't Like Hearing This

Here's some work that gets right to the heart of modern drug discovery: how are we supposed to deal with the variety of patients we're trying to treat? And the variety in the diseases themselves? And how does that correlate with our models of disease? This new paper, a collaboration between eight institutions in the US and Europe, is itself a look at two other recent large efforts. One of these, the Cancer Genome Project, tested 138 anticancer drugs against 727 cell lines. Its authors said at the time (last year) that "By linking drug activity to the functional complexity of cancer genomes, systematic pharmacogenomic profiling in cancer cell lines provides a powerful biomarker discovery platform to guide rational cancer therapeutic strategies". The other study, the Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia, tested 24 drugs against 1,036 cell lines. That one appeared at about the same time, and its authors said ". . .our results indicate that large, annotated cell-line collections may help to enable preclinical stratification schemata for anticancer agents. The generation of genetic predictions of drug response in the preclinical setting and their incorporation into cancer clinical trial design could speed the emergence of ‘personalized’ therapeutic regimens." Well, will they? As the latest paper shows, the two earlier efforts overlap to the extent of 15 drugs, 471 cell lines, 64 genes and the expression of 12,153 genes. How well do they match up? Unfortunately, the answer is "Not t...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Cancer Source Type: blogs