BioCentury
ARTICLE | Tools & Techniques

Broad launches tool to identify vulnerabilities of cancer cells

April 16, 2018 11:47 PM UTC

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University launched a publicly available online portal that allows any researcher worldwide to access and analyze data on genetic and pharmacologic dependencies of cancer cell lines, and associated molecular features. Compiled by Broad's Cancer Dependency Map, or DepMap, team, the portal could help identify new therapeutic targets aimed at specific vulnerabilities of cancer cells and the biomarkers that predict them. The portal was presented at the American Association for Cancer Research meeting in Chicago.

Broad said the portal's data exploration tool offers users, especially those with no computational background, an "easy and convenient way" to visualize data, such as discerning the relationship between dependency and expression of a gene of interest. It also provides "gene essentiality profiles for nearly every gene in the genome," as well as dependency profiles at genome scale across more than 500 human cell lines...