Glutamine sensitivity analysis identifies the xCT antiporter as a common triple negative breast tumor therapeutic target.

A small number of tumor-derived cell lines have formed the mainstay of cancer therapeutic development, yielding drugs with impact typically measured as months to disease progression. To develop more effective breast cancer therapeutics, and more readily understand their potential clinical impact, we constructed a functional metabolic portrait of 46 independently-derived breast tumorigenic cell lines, contrasted with purified normal breast epithelial subsets, freshly isolated pleural effusion breast tumor samples and culture-adapted, non-tumorigenic mammary epithelial cell derivatives. We report our analysis of glutamine uptake, dependence, and identification of a significant subset of triple negative samples that are glutamine auxotrophs. This NCBI GEO submission comprises a small datasest generated to compare the expression profiles of the above nontumorigenic, purified normal and purified pleural effusion samples with 10 established breast cancer-derived cell lines. This dataset was subsequently merged with a previously published expression dataset derived from 45 independent breast cancer derived cell lines (Neve, et al 2006), and analyses contrasting various subsets of the merged dataset were published.