National Cancer Institute (NCI) Program for Natural Product Discovery: Exploring NCI-60 Screening Data of Natural Product Samples with Artificial Neural Networks

National Cancer Institute (NCI) Program for Natural Product Discovery is a new initiative aimed at creating new technologies for natural product-based drug discovery. Here, we present the development of a neural network-based bioinformatics platform for visualization and analysis of natural product high-throughput screening data using the NCI's 60 human tumor cell anticancer drug screen. We demonstrate how the tool enables visualization of similar patterns of response that can be parsed both chemically and taxonomically, grouping NCI-60 biological profiles in one easy-to-use bioinformatics interface.

Automated summary

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has launched a new initiative, the Program for Natural Product Discovery, to develop new technologies for drug discovery based on natural products. In this study, we developed a bioinformatics platform using neural network-based algorithms to visualize and analyze high-throughput screening data from NCI's 60 human tumor cell anticancer drug screen. Our results demonstrate the platform's capability to group biological profiles of the NCI-60 based on similar chemical and taxonomic patterns, providing a user-friendly interface for researchers.