The Joint AstraZeneca - Cancer Research Horizons Functional Genomics Centre (FGC): A pioneering partnership driving oncology target discovery using pooled CRISPR screening
Abstract: The discovery of novel therapeutic targets that translate into clinical successes is needed in order to create life changing medicines that will change the outcome for cancer patients. The Functional Genomics Centre (FGC) – a joint venture between AstraZeneca (AZ) and Cancer Research UK’s (CRUK) drug discovery engine, Cancer Research Horizons (CRH), was created in 2019 to address this problem.Our vision was to become a world leading centre for CRISPR screening, cancer models, and computational approaches to big data with the goal of accelerating target discovery in order to create new cancer medicines. Now, comprised of 30 cancer and computational scientists who have combined completed 547 pooled CRISPR screens across 78 projects and 153 cell models – that vision has been realised.
Powered by collaboration and leveraging the world-class oncology research of CRUK and the drug discovery expertise of AZ, we focus 80 % of our time of creating data for projects and 20 % on innovating through collaboration to create new technologies. Uniquely, this partnership also democratises access to CRISPR screening for entire CRUK-funded academic network of scientists and clinicians, who can submit their research projects to the FGC for screening, as well as using the research tools and expertise we generate.
Here we highlight examples of how the FGC is leading the development and improvement of CRISPR screening tools to impact our discovery portfolio, including the independent evaluation all publicly available CRISPR libraries. We have used this data to create an optimised, small genome-wide CRISPR libraries that reduce the experimental scale of CRISPR screens by 50% and enable us to impact more projects, faster, at a lower cost and importantly - more sustainably.