NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The Wellcome Trust's Sanger Institute and Horizon Discovery today announced they will be collaborating to translate information about human genetic variation into more effective treatments for cancer.
Under the three year partnership, which began last month, Horizon Discovery will "augment" the Sanger Institute's Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer project with the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, which was initiated to profile clinical and pre-clinical cancer drugs for their activity on a large collection of human cancer cell lines by identifying genetic markers of drug sensitivity.
Horizon will supply to the project its resource of more than 200 genetically defined "X-Man" in vitro human cancer models that contain known cancer-causing mutations. They will be used for sensitivity profiling against a panel of clinical and pre-clinical cancer drugs, the partners said in a statement.
The Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer project is a five-year project launched in 2008. In June, researchers involved in it said they were releasing treatment response data and corresponding genomic information for hundreds of cancer samples.