The Resistant Cancer Cell Line (RCCL) collection at Kent and the Dr Petra Joh Research Institute in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, has reached a new milestone and is now hosting 3,000 drug-resistant cancer cell lines, making it the largest collection of its kind worldwide. Since its inception, the collection has been used by more than 100 research groups from academia and industry around the world to inform the development of effective cancer therapies.
Drug resistance is the major reason for the failure of anti-cancer therapies. Many cancers respond initially well to the treatment but become eventually resistant resulting in patient death. New therapies are needed for such cancer patients, who have run out of established therapeutic options.
Professor Jindrich Cinatl, a research group leader at the Dr Petra Joh Research Institute, began to establish drug-resistant cancer cell lines as models of acquired resistance in cancer in the 1980s. He now leads the RCCL collection together with Professor Martin Michaelis, who runs a joint wet-computational research lab together with Professor Mark Wass at the University of Kent and also holds a position at the Dr Petra Joh Research Institute.
Work with the cell lines from the RCCL collection and additional studies have shown that every resistance development results in a unique set of resistance mechanisms. As many resistance models are needed as possible to cover this diversity, which makes the availability of 3,000 resistance models an important milestone for the RCCL collection and cancer research.
The RCCL collection is the worldwide largest collection of preclinical resistance models in cancer. Its cell lines are used by collaborators around the world and enable research that would not be possible without them.
Professor Michaelis said: ‘Every additional cell line helps us and researchers across the globe to understand the processes better that lead to resistance formation and therapy failure in cancer.’
Professor Cinatl added: ‘The improved understanding enables us and others to work on novel therapies for patients, who currently do not have satisfactory treatment options.’