DREAM Challenge’s mission to find most synergistic cancer drug combinations reaches a step closer to reality

Thanks to AstraZeneca’s release of preclinical data from more than 50 medicines, the DREAM Challenge’s mission of finding the most synergistic cancer drug combinations has reached a step closer to reality.

An open innovation competition, the DREAM Challenge, is an established crowd sourcing initiative to examine fundamental questions in biology and medicine. It is based on the making of computer models that can recognize the properties of drugs, making them powerful in combination.

The release of a data set of this scale in public is extraordinary, and is planned in a way to help advance research into combination cancer therapy around the global scientific community.

AstraZeneca, to find such new therapies, is going to join forces with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, the European Bioinformatic Institute, Sage Bionetworks, and the DREAM community on the AstraZeneca-Sanger Drug Combination Prediction DREAM Challenge.

AstraZeneca’s released data included around 10,000 tested combinations that calculate the drugs’ ability to destroy cancer cell lines from different tumor types, such as colon, lung, and breast cancer. Foe the same cell lines, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute will make genomic data assessable to the participants of DREAM Challenge.

Therapeutic combinations have the potential that can bring transformation in the way cancer treatment is done, including improved efficacy over monotherapy, and also the ability to conquer drug resistance.

The DREAM challenge went live in September. It so far attracted more than 294 registrants. An AstraZeneca spokesperson said, “This is the fastest recruiting DREAM challenge ever (compared to more than 35 previous challenges) and is on the way to having the largest participation ever”.