Ba/F3 and Kinase Drug Discovery

Kinase inhibition is an area of significant interest across academia and pharmaceutical industry and kinase drug discovery has resulted in the rapid development of a new generation of cancer drugs. Those years, a murine bone marrow-derived pro-B-cell line named Ba/F3 is proved to be very helpful with kinase drug discovery.

Protein kinases have become the pharmaceutical industry's most important class of drug target in the field of cancer. According to the statistics online, about 20 drugs related to kinases have been approved for clinical use over the past decade, and hundreds more are undergoing clinical trials. The recent approval of the first protein kinase inhibitors for the treatment of inflammatory diseases, along with the enhanced understanding of the signaling networks that control the immune system, suggests that there will be a surge of interest in this area over the next 10 years.

With the rapid development of kinase research, Ba/F3 cells’ significance for kinase drug discovery is found. Ba/F3 cells are immortalized murine bone marrow-derived pro-B-cell line. The growth and proliferation of this cell line depends on the presence of the substance called IL3. When cultured in the presence of IL3, or other growth-promoting factors, BaF3 cells show high resistance to X-irradiation and the cytotoxic drugs etoposide and cisplatin.

Ba/F3 becomes increasingly popular as a model system for assessing both the potency and downstream signaling of kinase oncogenes. It can also used to assess the ability of small-molecule kinase inhibitors to block kinase activity. Owing to their growth properties, Ba/F3 cells have recently been adapted to high-throughput assay formats for compound profiling. Further, several published approaches show the promise in predicting resistance to small-molecule kinase inhibitors elicited by point mutations interfering with inhibitor binding.

The use of Ba/F3 cells to predict clinical resistance and the ability to test the transforming capacity of newly identified kinase mutations and to profile drug candidates and compound libraries in high-throughput fashion together will greatly facilitate developments in the field of kinase drug discovery.

BA/F3 cells are available here

http://www.creative-bioarray.com/BA-F3-CSC-C2045-item-1604.htm