Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia launched by Novartis and Broad Institute.

The information included in the encyclopedia may help researchers identify those patients who could benefit from specific drugs; the researchers involved in the cataloging of these data suggest that cell-line collection such as this could enable a successful preclinical stratification schemata for anticancer agents. It is hoped that the emergence of personalized therapies could be assisted by the genetic prediction of drug response in a preclinical setting. “Without access to a systematically collected set of molecular data, researchers can’t match experiments from cell lines with patient tumors when new medicines become available,” said William Sellers, Global Head of Oncology, Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research.