Nature Chemical Biology的一篇新论文提出了一种全新的刻画药物作用机制的方式，用RNAi技术产生一系列细胞系，用药物对这些细胞系的“response signature”来反映药物对细胞的作用特征。通过与已知药物“response signature”的相似性搜索，可以预测和鉴定新药物的作用机制（mechanism of action）。（原文：A mammalian functional-genetic approach to characterizing cancer therapeutics）
之前，对药物的作用机制或作用靶标的刻画主要有两类方法：一为NCI 60，一为CMAP。对这两套思路的介绍可以参考我们论文中的这段描述：
"There are two methods which are commonly used to interrogate the action of compounds on cells. The first method, adopted by the Connectivity Map [19] effort, measures a ‘compound response signature.’ In this approach gene expression signatures are established based on changes in gene expression in response to short term treatment with particular compounds; this response signature can serve as an effective tool for probing the compound(s) mechanism of action (MOA) [19]. A second method is measurement of a ‘drug sensitivity signature’ and is used by various applications based on the National Cancer Institute NCI 60 in vitro drug screen project [20]. The NCI 60 cell lines screen panel has proved to be an effective way to identify drug sensitivity specific biomarkers [21] as the panel has already been comprehensively characterized via profiling at different levels (mRNA, protein, microRNAs, DNA methylation and metabolites etc.)". (全文链接：Pre-Clinical Drug Prioritization via Prognosis-Guided Genetic Interaction Networks，PLoS ONE 2010）
Nature Chemical Biology这篇文章中的方法大致类似NCI 60的思路，不同点在于：NCI 60是利用自然发生的60中细胞系作为维度，而这篇文章是选择跟细胞生长凋亡密切相关的若干基因（针对肿瘤药物的研究），产生针对性很强的一组细胞系。NCI 60系列与CMAP系列的最大区别在于前者内涵了表型phenotpype的信息，因此可以满足一些有针对性的任务（比如肿瘤药物筛选）。
