• What is a cancer cell line?
    • a cancer cell line is a collected population from a patient’s original tumor
    • can study just using hte cell line (in the lab) instead of needing the patient
  • normal cells will die after a few rounds of dividing= senescence
    • cancer cells bypass the normal limits and can grow forever
      • these cells can grow in a petri dish or flask and become immortal
  • first cell line= Johns Hopkins University
    • Dr. George Gey from a HeLa cell (cervical cancer tumor from Henrietta Lacks)
    • first cell to grow on a petri dish indefinitely
  • on a HeLa cell the purple section is most likely the nucleus region
  • the green portion is called the cytoskelton (type of protein that acts as a highway in the cell that works to transport materials)
  • very easily distinguised (can count easily)
    • this is helpful because you can see if the cell growth is inhibited, indicating the drug or treatment testing works
  • why use cell lines?
    • its very easy to grow and manipulate in the lab
    • can grow from various types of cancers
    • serves as a model to: study the tumor genetics, discover cancer vunerabilities, and used to test theraputic compouds to see the efficacy
      • ex.) study signaling pathways in the cancer to see functional changes
  • cancers have different subtypes, so when diagnosed with a certain type of cancer (in the body), you can know the specific type
    • ex.) in breast cancer: ER (estrogen), PR (progesteron), and HER
    • what chemotherapy treatment that is delivered is based on the type of cancer subtype
  • In 2000, Perout published a paper showing how around 65 tumors showcased different subtypes
    • this revolutionized the understanding of breast cancer heterogenity (people can see that you can;t treat all breast cancer the same)
  • In 2009, anouther group refined from Perou’s original 2000 genes to 50 genes for clinical use
    • they classified tumors into the same 5 subtypes (using qRT-PCR) and also introduced the Risk of Recurrance score
    • this led to the clonical test Prosigna (under Nanostrings Technologies Inc)
  • the government puts a lot of money into storing cancer cell lines
    • have the Broad Institute which contains multi-omics data which is used to study cancer biology and predict drug sensitivity
  • pharmacologic data is very useful for cell delivery
  • Drug screening using cancer cell lines evaluate the efficacy, potency, and selectivity of the drugs against the dofferent cancer types
    • 1.) select cell lines
    • 2.) seed the cell line into multi-well plates and allow the cells to dhere and grow to a certain density under standard conditions
    • 3.) a library of candidate drugs or different concentrations of a drug is applied to the cells
    • 4.) cells are incubated
    • 5.) a dose-response curve is made and analyzed (in this case you would want to inhibit the growth)
      • look ath the IC50 and EC50
  • Based on the cancer types, the treatments will vary

    • ex.) chemotherapy for Breast cancer= 2 types (2 types listed), hormone therapy (3 types listed), and targeted therapy (3 types listed)

      In our example we used for Jupyter Notebook, we found out that in both breast cancer and in myeloid cancers that there a many different subtypes with soem occuring much mroe frequently than others. For example in breast cancer, the model subtype HER2+ occured 16 time (but the distribution was not only skewed towards that one type), while in myeloid cancer, the distibution was much more skewed towards the BCR-ABL1 positive subtype (though there were many different subtypes that occured, this one occured most frequently by far).

<
Previous Post
Investigating Gene Mutations in Jupyter Notebook
>
Next Post
Liquid Biopsy for Cancer Metasis Detections Lesson