RadioGx: A New Preclinical Tool to Model Intrinsic Radiosensitivity.

Radiotherapy is perhaps the most ubiquitous single treatment modality for patients with cancer. Despite its routine use, biomarkers of treatment response are critically lacking, and the biology underlying the heterogeneity in clinical response to radiation treatment remain largely unknown. In this issue of Cancer Research, Manem and colleagues seek to change this paradigm and detail the development of a radiation response computational platform (RadioGx) that allows for the integrative analysis of radiation response using radiogenomic data derived from preclinical, in vitro sources (1). This platform holds promise for novel hypothesis generation and may allow for the discovery of novel mediators of radiation response that may improve the therapeutic efficacy of radiation. Importantly, it also moves us closer to uncovering and validating radiation response biomarkers that may prove clinically useful.See related article by Manem et al., p. 6227.