Explore, visualize, and analyze functional cancer proteomic data using the cancer proteome atlas

Abstract

Reverse-phase protein arrays (RPPA) represent a powerful functional proteomic approach to elucidate cancer-related molecular mechanisms and to develop novel cancer therapies. To facilitate community-based investigation of the large-scale protein expression data generated by this platform, we have developed a user-friendly, open-access bioinformatic resource, The Cancer Proteome Atlas (TCPA, http://tcpaportal.org), which contains two separate web applications. The first one focuses on RPPA data of patient tumors, which contains >8, 000 samples of 32 cancer types from The Cancer Genome Atlas and other independent patient cohorts. The second application focuses on the RPPA data of cancer cell lines and contains >650 independent cell lines across 19 lineages. Many of these cell lines have publicly available, high-quality DNA, RNA, and drug screening data. TCPA provides various analytic and visualization modules to help cancer researchers explore these datasets and generate testable hypotheses in an effective and intuitive manner. Cancer Res; 77(21); e51-54.