© 2000 by Oxford University Press
Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Vol. 92, No. 8, 600-601,
April 19, 2000
© 2000 Oxford University Press
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Online Databases Bring Research to The Desktop
Most medical researchers once believed that creating large computer databases of known genes or DNA sequences was like "art for art’s sake"—a case of gathering information for the sake of gathering information. Although interesting, it had no immediate relevance to understanding or treating a disease.
But today, as technology has advanced to make data collection faster and far less expensive, online scientific Web sites have thrived. With a few clicks of a computer mouse, scientists now can scroll through vast databases of biological information, allowing them to form hypotheses at their desktops and quickly pursue new discoveries.
In two articles in the March issue of the journal Nature Genetics, scientists from Stanford University School of Medicine, Palo Alto, Calif., and the National Cancer Institute collaborated to report a major harvest of new data in the study of cancer.
Using DNA microarray technology, the scientists first recorded the expression patterns of approximately 8,000 biologically interesting genes in 60 distinct tumor cell lines. All of the cell lines currently are used in NCI’s national drug screening program, and they represent a range of common human tumors. The data from this study can be accessed online at http://genome-www.stanford.edu/nci60 and http://discover.nci.nih.gov.
According to Patrick Brown, M.D., Ph.D., a senior author on the study and a scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Stanford University School of Medicine, the new database offers scientists detailed molecular profiles that point to the inherent similarities and differences in the biology of the cell lines—helpful information in trying to understand tumor development.
"One of the major advantages in studying these 60 tumor cell lines is that, as a part of a national program, there is a complete record of all of the drugs to which these cells have been exposed during the screening process," said Brown. "It is hard to find such a well characterized resource, especially in the clinic, where most tumor samples arrive with confusing or fragmentary treatment histories."
In the second paper, the same scientists compared the gene-expression data in the 60 cell lines with the "activity profiles" of 1,400 compounds tested previously in the NCI drug screening program. Most of the compounds are either standard chemotherapy drugs or agents that have been tested extensively in clinical trials. The results of this analysis are posted at http://discover.nci.nih.gov.
"Clearly these analyses have limitations, most notably that they were performed in cultured cells and involved fewer than 10% of all human genes," said John N. Weinstein, M.D., Ph.D., a senior author on the study and an NCI scientist. "Nevertheless, these data provide a resource from which cancer researchers can be expected to generate new ideas about the biology of tumor cells and new leads for the development of improved cancer drugs."
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