Accelerating drug discovery: Open source cancer cell biology?

The possibility that experimental data from diverse cell biology experiments might shed light on other experiments has been generally outside the realm of cancer biologists. Recent experiments suggest that core RNA expression profiles distilled from experiments using a set of known members with related attributes may be used as query tools to probe expression profiles from other unrelated experiments. The potential benefit arises from the possibility to share findings without fully reconstructing the exact initial conditions. The limitations will be framed by the robustness of the hypotheses so generated.