Online Data Retrieval Software Eases Access to Cancer Cell-Line Information

An online application freely available to biotech and genomics researchers allows rapid data retrieval from one of the largest and best-characterized cancer cell databases.

A paper published in the July 15, 2012, issue of the journal Cancer Research described the CellMiner software application, which was designed for use with the [US] National Cancer Institute's (Bethesda, MD, USA) NCI-60 library.

The NCI-60 is a set of 59 human cancer cell lines derived from diverse tissues: brain, blood and bone marrow, breast, colon, kidney, lung, ovary, prostate, and skin. Since 1992 these cell lines have been subjected to a battery of experiments including; extensive pharmacological characterization by treatment with over 100,000 chemical compounds, chromosome karyotyping, and gene expression analyses conducted with various DNA microarray platforms.

CellMiner is a web application that facilitates systems biology through the retrieval and integration of the molecular and pharmacological data sets for the NCI-60 cell lines. The tools that comprise CellMiner are available online for free (please see Related Links below). These tools provide rapid access to data from 22,379 genes catalogued in the NCI-60 library and from 20,503 previously analyzed chemical compounds, including 102 [US] Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved drugs.

"Previously you would have to hire a bioinformatics team to sort through all of the data, but these tools put the entire database at the fingertips of any researcher," said senior author Dr. Yves Pommier, head of the laboratory of molecular pharmacology at the National Cancer Institute. "These tools allow researchers to analyze drug responses as well as make comparisons from drug to drug and gene to gene. We are looking forward to seeing how other people are going to use this tool to look at gene coregulation, regulation of gene expression, and the relationship between gene expression and cancer."

Related Links:
National Cancer Institute
CellMiner