The high rate of clinical response to protein-kinase-targeting drugs matched to cancer patients with specific genomic alterations has prompted efforts to use cancer cell line (CCL) profiling to ...identify additional biomarkers of small-molecule sensitivities. We have quantitatively measured the sensitivity of 242 genomically characterized CCLs to an Informer Set of 354 small molecules that target many nodes in cell circuitry, uncovering protein dependencies that: (1) associate with specific cancer-genomic alterations and (2) can be targeted by small molecules. We have created the Cancer Therapeutics Response Portal (http://www.broadinstitute.org/ctrp) to enable users to correlate genetic features to sensitivity in individual lineages and control for confounding factors of CCL profiling. We report a candidate dependency, associating activating mutations in the oncogene β-catenin with sensitivity to the Bcl-2 family antagonist, navitoclax. The resource can be used to develop novel therapeutic hypotheses and to accelerate discovery of drugs matched to patients by their cancer genotype and lineage.
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•A therapeutics resource identifies cancer genotype-compound sensitivity relationships•Genetic features of cancer cell lines correlate with their response to compounds•The resource controls for possible confounding factors of genomic cell-line profiling•Results suggest a strategy for treating cancers with mutations in β-catenin
The Cancer Therapeutics Response Portal catalogs the sensitivity of more than 200 cancer cell lines to specific small molecules. This resource should accelerate the development of individualized therapies tailored to specific cancers and patients.
The problem of how to explore structure–activity relationships (SARs) systematically is still largely unsolved in medicinal chemistry. Recently, data analysis tools have been introduced to navigate ...activity landscapes and to assess SARs on a large scale. Initial investigations reveal a surprising heterogeneity among SARs and shed light on the relationship between ‘global’ and ‘local’ SAR features. Moreover, insights are provided into the fundamental issue of why modeling tools work well in some cases, but not in others.
The wealth of biological screening data that is generated poses substantial problems to medicinal chemistry. A key question becomes how to best prioritize and select hits for further evaluation from ...the many weakly active compounds that are typically identified in HTS campaigns. Such decisions can be substantially supported if it is possible to evaluate preliminary structure-activity relationship (SAR) information that might be contained in screening data. If SAR information can be extracted from screening data, one can attempt to estimate the chemical optimization potential of hits. We will discuss different types of approaches that have been developed to facilitate HTS data analysis, with special emphasis on recent methods to explore SAR information contained in screening sets.