MADRID, 2 (EUROPA PRESS)
Experts of the Broad Institute at United States in collaboration with members of the Novartis Institute for biomedical research, just launch a comprehensive encyclopedia with genetic and molecular information about 1,000 cancer cell lines used in research and development of drugs.
The results of the collaboration, published in the journal ' Nature ' and disclosed in advance on the Internet, could allow scientists around the world use this information to improve the design of the trials against cancer and advance their research.
The encyclopedia, available to the public, could improve the design of the studies on cancer and allow progress in its investigation. Genetic and molecular cell lines profiles data are freely available to the scientific community on the website of the Broad Institute.
Developed algorithms to predict responses to drugs based on genetic and molecular composition of cancerous cells. Match this information with forms of genotyped quickly samples of tumours of patients represents the next step in the effort to allow the personalization of cancer treatment.
Cell lines were acquired from commercial distributors of the United States.US, Europe, Japan and Korea and represent the wide variety of cancer as a disease, that include various subtypes of common forms of both cancer just as frequent.
To the President of the Novartis Institutes for biomedical research (NIBR, by its acronym in English), Mark Fishman, “explore the cell lines with drugs targeting specific pathways, as it has been for the encyclopedia of cancer cell lines, provides a powerful tool for the design of the treatment of cancer”.
“We put this information at the disposal of the public yesperamos that many researchers and other people in the industry use these data in order to discover new targets for drugs to assess current therapies and to facilitate the treatment of patients with cancer,” has been added.
Researchers used cell lines to shed light on how patients could better use new drugs or existing ones. In view of the Global director of Oncology of the NIBR, William Sellers, the encyclopedia provided scientists the possibility to build predictive models with the types of patients who will respond to a particular type of drugs.
“Without access to a set of systematically collected molecular data, researchers not can relate the experiments of cell lines with tumors of patients when they are available new drugs”, he said.
According to the main authors and researchers of the NIBR, Jordi Barretina and Giordano Caponigro, each cell line characterized genetically through a series of great performance analysis at the Broad Institute, including global RNA expression patterns, changes in the number of copies of the DNA, as well as variations in the sequence of DNA in nearly 1,360 cancer-associated genes, and pharmacological profiles of various drugs in about half of the cell lines.
