Currently, pancreatic cancer has an estimated 5-year survival rate of only 5-6%. The projection that pancreatic cancer will be the second leading cause of cancer related death by 2020 compounded by the numerous clinical trial failures precipitates the need for novel approaches to accelerate progress in new medicine development. Cell lines used for screening pre-clinical compounds prior to animal models and human testing are usually chosen based on ease of access and literature prevalence. However, the constellation of genomic derangements in cell lines commonly used for in vitro studies may not be representative of pancreatic cancer. In this study, we leveraged copy number variation (CNV) and targeted sequencing data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia (CCLE) to predict optimal cell lines that mirror pancreatic cancer genomes most closely.
