Dana‑Farber and Global Consortia Launch Cutting‑Edge Platforms for Cancer Drug Discovery
Researchers at Dana‑Farber Cancer Institute have built a systematic platform to discover molecular glue degraders, enabling the identification of the first metabolically activated glue and expanding the range of disease‑related proteins that can be targeted for destruction via protein degradation.
International collaborations, including the Wellcome Sanger Institute, MIT’s Koch Institute and partners, have released a public biobank of hundreds of patient‑derived tumor organoids covering dozens of cancer types, together with genomic, transcriptomic and CRISPR‑screen data to support drug‑target validation.
A separate effort at the University of California, San Francisco combined clinical‐trial biomarker signatures from the I‑SPY2 breast‑cancer study with patient‑derived organoids to predict responses in triple‑negative breast cancer, pinpointing compounds such as the BCL‑2 inhibitor navitoclax that restore chemotherapy sensitivity.
Together, these tools aim to broaden therapeutic options, accelerate pre‑clinical testing and address tumor heterogeneity across cancers.
Entities: Benjamin Ebert · Dana‑Farber Cancer Institute · Dr Carmen Herranz‑Ors · Dr Mathew Garnett · Human Cancer Model Initiative · Massachusetts Institute of Technology · UK hospitals (England and Scotland) · University of California, San Francisco · Wellcome Sanger Institute