Genomics of drug sensitivity in bladder cancer: an integrated resource for pharmacogenomic analysis in bladder cancer

BACKGROUND: Bladder cancer has numerous genomic features that are potentially actionable by targeted agents. Nevertheless, both pre-clinical and clinical research using molecular targeted agents have been very limited in bladder cancer. RESULTS: We created the Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Bladder Cancer (GDBC) database, an integrated database (DB) to facilitate the genomic understanding of bladder cancer in relation to drug sensitivity, in order to promote potential therapeutic applications of targeted agents in bladder cancer treatment. The GDBC database contains two separate datasets: 1) in-house drug sensitivity data, in which 13 targeted agents were tested against 10 bladder cancer cell lines; 2) data extracted and integrated from public databases, including the Cancer Therapeutics Research Portal, Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia, Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer, Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes, and the Cancer Gene Census databases, as well as bladder cancer genomics data and synthetic lethality/synthetic dosage lethality connections. CONCLUSIONS: GDBC is an integrated DB of genomics and drug sensitivity data with a specific focus on bladder cancer. With a user-friendly web-interface, GDBC helps users generate genomics-based hypotheses that can be tested experimentally using drugs and cell lines included in GDBC. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12920-018-0406-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.