GNS Healthcare said this week that it has signed a subcontract with SAIC-Frederick to create in silico simulations of drug interaction data generated by applying several well-known cancer treatments to the National Cancer Institute's NCI-60 cancer cell line panel.
Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
GNS said that in the first phase of the project, it will use its Reverse Engineering and Forward Simulation platform to build computer models from transcriptional profiling data previously collected by NCI from the application of several drugs to the panel.
The list of drugs includes doxorubicin X2, Millennium Pharmaceuticals' Velcade (bortezimib), paclitaxel, Bristol-Myers Squibb's Sprycel (dasatinib), Pfizer's Sutent (sunitinib), and Wyeth's Rapamycin.
The simulations are expected to provide insights into key genetic and molecular mechanisms of drug efficacy and resistance in cancer by connecting drug doses to transcriptional networks to endpoints, GNS said.
GNS also plans to build versions of the computer models that may be made available more broadly to cancer scientists for their own research via a web interface.