About us

The Genomic and Pharmacology Facility falls within the National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Center for Cancer Research (CCR), within the Developmental Therapeutics Branch. It's mission is to manage and assess molecular interaction data obtained through multiple platforms, increase the understanding of the effect of those interactions on the chemosensitivity of cancer, and create tools that will facilitate that process. Translation of that information will be directed towards the recognition of diagnostic and therapeutic cancer biomarkers, and directed cancer therapy.

This web-ste is a development of the Genomic and Pharmacology Facility run under the auspices of Dr. Yves Pommier, and managed and supervised by Mr. William Reinhold. It was originally developed by Dr. John Weinstein.

The Miner Suite of bioinformatic software packages.

These packages are freely available for public use. Our characterization and analysis of the NCI-60 cancer cell lines, the DNA, RNA, protein, epigenetic and pharmacological levels is accessible through CellMiner, with the expended version including additional cell line sets available through CellMinerCDB.

•	CellMiner: A database and query tool designed for the cancer research community to facilitate integration and study of molecular and pharmacological data for the NCI-60 cancerous cell lines.
•	CellMinerCDB: CellMiner Cross Database (CDB) is the first web application to allow translational researchers to conduct analyses across all major cancer cell line pharmacogenomic data sources from NCI-DTP NCI-60, Sanger GDSC, and Broad CCLE/CTRP. It provides matched molecular and drug activity profiling data. This data may be used to 1) assess molecular and drug data reproducibility, 2) determine repositioning opportunities for FDA-approved compounds, 3) identify potential drug response and gene regulatory determinants, and 4) identify and validate novel genes associated with phenotypic processes. This data is an important precision medicine resource.
•	CIMminer: A tool that produces Clustered Image Maps (CIMs) (i.e., clustered heat maps).
•	GoMiner: A tool that leverages the Gene Ontology for biological interpretation of microarrays data.
•	High-Throughput GoMiner: A tool for batch processing of multiple microarrays and integrated CIMs of the GoMiner results.
•	MIMminer: A repository of the electronically navigatable Kohn Molecular Interaction Maps.
•	MatchMiner: [The MatchMiner is retired.] A tool for batch-translation among many types of gene and protein identifiers.
•	SpliceCenter: A suite of very user-friendly tools designed for use by every bench biologist who needs to check for the impact of gene splice variation on common molecular biology technologies including RT-PCR, RNAi, expression microarrays, and peptide-based assays.
•	SpliceMiner: [The SpliceMiner is retired.] A web application for mapping microarrray probes to transcripts in an exon-specific manner.
•	AbMiner: A tool that allows users to search for appropriate, commercially available antibodies for research purposes, and to match each antibody to its respective genomic identifiers.

Drugs Against Cancer: Stories of Discovery and the Quest for a Cure by Dr. Kurt W. Kohn

Kurt W. Kohn, M.D., Ph.D. devotes nearly 60 years of his life to anti-cancer drug research at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland. In his book, Drugs Against Cancer, he wrote "I felt a responsibility to make a record of the part of the cancer drug development effort with which I was associated, going back nearly 60 years, and to relate it to the global anti-cancer drug discovery and development efforts." Therefore, the book was born.

Drugs Against Cancer may be viewed as a combination of science, history, medicine, and memoir, and hopefully could mostly be understood without a great deal of prerequisite knowledge. Dr. Kohn has tried to give an account of the earliest published work leading to the anti-cancer drug discovery stories that he will relate. The aim of his book was to explain how the knowledge and application of cancer chemotherapy drugs developed. It is in large part a historical account.