IT'S huge and it could help cure cancer. That's the aim, anyway, of the world's largest cancer database, launched this week.
The online resource, called CanSAR, was developed by a team at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, and contains 1.7 billion experimental results relating to genes, clinical trials and pharmacological data.
The idea is to provide a free computerised system that can analyse the huge amounts of data accumulated over the past decade on cancer, in order to provide leads for genes or drug targets to pursue for future treatments.
For example, CanSAR summarises what is known about any gene of interest, including which drugs react with it and whether it is active in healthy tissue. A prototype evaluated 479 cancer-associated genes, and picked out 46 leads, many not previously considered as targets for therapy (Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, doi.org/p2p).
"It means people can focus their efforts on targets most likely to give returns in the short term," says Bissan Al-Lazikani, head of the team that developed CanSAR.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Cancer megadata"
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