Parsing resistance pathways

Finding mutations that cause resistance to cancer drugs is at best laborious and at worst haphazard, as it involves either one-by-one testing of candidate genes or wholesale screens on resistant cell lines to find agents that can reverse the resistance. A team of U.S. researchers has walked a fine line between the two with a strategy to gain answers faster than with other approaches, that builds in knowledge of pathways and nodes, and can be used to solve resistance for drugs on the market or - pre-emptively - for compounds in development.

Although standard methods can implicate genetic mutations, they provide limited insight on how those mutations affect signaling pathways within the cell and give little guidance on the best approach to overcome resistance...