Novartis creates public portal for cancer knockdown data

Novartis AG (NYSE:NVS; SIX:NOVN) published its large-scale Project DRIVE cancer study online in Cell Thursday, outlining the results of nearly 8,000 gene knockdowns in roughly 400 patient derived cancer cell lines. The publication -- the first of this scale for gene perturbations in cancer lines -- involved 100 Novartis researchers, and was accompanied by the launch of the DRIVE Data Portal, a public website that lets researchers access all of the DRIVE study data.

Novartis senior oncology researcher Robert McDonald told BioCentury the DRIVE project was built on the foundation laid by Novartis and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard when they established the Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia (CCLE), a catalog of genetic and molecular data of 1,000 common cancer cell lines that have undergone extensive molecular profiling...