Researchers at the Broad Institute, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, MIT and Harvard just published a drug repurposing screen in Nature Cancer of 4,518 compounds, mostly FDA approved drugs and clinical candidates against 578 human cancer cell lines. The technology that enabled this massively parallel anticancer drug discovery approach is the PRISM bar-coded cell lines where pools of 25 cell lines are treated with a specific drug and then antiproliferative/anticancer effects are discovered when specific bar codes drop out of the pool via next-gen sequencing.
Interestingly, and not surprising that a significant number of their hits from this screen are not cancer drugs. This study helps to uncover new mechanisms that can be used to fight cancer with existing drugs.
