Project Achilles is a systematic effort aimed at identifying and cataloging genetic vulnerabilities across hundreds of genomically characterized cancer cell lines. The project uses a genome-wide shRNA library to silence individual genes and identify those genes that affect cell survival. Large-scale functional screening of cancer cell lines provides a complementary approach to those studies that aim to characterize the molecular alterations (mutations, copy number alterations, etc.) of primary tumors, such as The Cancer Genome Atlas. The overall goal of the project is to link cancer genetic dependencies to their molecular characteristics in order to Identify molecular targets and guide therapeutic development.

cell line profiling