NEW YORK, Aug. 22 - The National Cancer Institute and informatics company LeadScope have built a bioinformatics tool that links gene-expression data with information about antiangiogenic compounds, the organizations said today.
"Someone who is trying to design or perfect cancer drugs would ideally like to relate a gene or protein directly to drug structure," John Weinstein, an NCI scientist, said in a statement. The purpose of the bioinformatics is to explain how the chemical nature of drugs affects behavior in various cell lines, he added.
This drug-design and -discovery tool, outlined in the August issue of The Pharmacogenomics Journal, uses LeadScope and LeadMiner software to tie together a pair databases of information about cells and chemical compounds: The first includes inhibition information gleaned from about 80,000 chemical compounds and 60 human cancer cell lines known as NCI-60, and the second contains gene-expression patterns for those cells lines, according to Columbus, Ohio-based LeadScope.
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