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  • IN BRIEF

Identifying synergistic drug combinations

  1. Sarah Crunkhorn
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Combination therapies using targeted anti-cancer agents have the potential to overcome resistance, enhance responses and reduce toxicity. Jaaks et al. screen the Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer (GDSC) database to measure the effects of 2,025 pairwise drug combinations in 125 breast, colorectal and pancreatic cancer cell lines. Synergy was observed in 5.2% of the 108,259 combination–cell line pairs. GDSCTools software identified multi-omics biomarkers of drug combination responses. Combining a TOP1 inhibitor with a CHEK1 inhibitor yielded particularly high synergy rates, in both microsatellite-stable and KRAS–TP53 double-mutant colon cell lines; the combination also halted tumour growth in mouse xenograft models.

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Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 21, 260 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41573-022-00041-1

References

  1. Jaaks, P. et al. Effective drug combinations in breast, colon and pancreatic cancer cells. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04437-2 (2022)

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