canSAR: Integrated Cancer Drug Discovery platform
Computational Biology and Chemogenomics Team
Section: Cancer Research UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit
In the post genomic era, drug discovery efforts are faced with an exponential growth large, systematically derived datasets. These are fuelled by faster and smarter technologies, and span the breadth of the drug discovery process. Advances in technologies in NGS, proteomics, RNAi studies, and chemical screening and structural biology, meant that the cancer drug discovery field has an unprecedented wealth of data.
However, in order to realise the therapeutic opportunities these data can deliver, we are faced with the challenge of effectively integrating and representing these data, and providing a global holistic view of the knowledge they yield.
To address this challenge, we have developed an integrated cancer focussed knowledge-base, canSAR, able to integrate heterogeneous biological, chemical, pharmacological and other data of clinical relevance.
The database is modular and extensible to allow for future data growth. The public version of canSAR (planned release 4Q10) will contain >11 Million experimentally derived measurements, >560,000 unique biologically active chemical structures and data from >1000 cancer cell lines. These data are collated from a number of public sources, and collectively annotated to ensure seamless integration. canSAR will also contain annotated molecular target data representing the human genome and a number of model organisms. Context driven data are generated “on the fly” from collaborator databases such as ROCK-BCFG and Array Express.
canSAR is accessed through a user-friendly web-based interface to support flexible querying.
canSAR will afford users from different disciplines to utilise the full breadth of this chemogenomic data to answer specific questions. For example:
- View Target Synopses to summarise publicly known data about a target and its variants including structural annotation, cancer-relevant mutations, chemical screening data, pathway and interaction networks
- View the bioactivity profile for a compound or chemical hit series, and identify likely off-targets activity and selectivity issues
- View chemical annotation of a protein interaction network, and use this to select the best chemical intervention points for this network
- And many others
canSAR is supported by Cancer Research UK grant number C309/A8274.
NEWS: canSAR pre-release for the Genomics of Drug Sensitivity project
The canSAR team are grateful the following collaborators for help and provision of data
In the Cancer Research UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit
