Pharmacogenomic profiling of cancer
drugs
Most cancer drugs are effective in only a fraction of the patients who
take them. If this responsive subset could be identified in advance,
patients would be spared useless, cytotoxic treatments, and the regulatory
pathway for new agents would be simplified. For a handful
of drugs, efficacy is known to track closely with the presence of
particular mutations, but, overall, the use of tumor genotype data
to predict optimal drug regimens is still at an early stage. Two new
reports have addressed this problem by pharmacological screening
on human cancer cell lines at a larger scale than has been carried out
previously. Garnett et al. tested 130 drugs on 639 cell lines, whereas
Barretina et al. collected sequence, chromosomal copy number and
transcriptional data on 947 cell lines and measured the activity of 24
drugs on 479 of these lines. Both studies uncovered known markers
of drug sensitivity as well as novel candidate markers. Moreover,
established correlations between drug efficacy and genotype were
found to be invalid in some cases. (