High-content imaging of six breast cancer cell lines treated with a library of small molecule kinase inhibitors.

To investigate the phenotypic effects that kinase inhibitors have on breast cancer cell lines at the single cell level, five breast cancer cell lines (hormone receptor-positive MCF7 cells, Her2-amplified SK-BR-3 cells, and triple negative BT-20, MDA-MB-231, and Hs 578T cells) and one non-tumorigenic breast cell line (MCF 10A) were treated at three doses with a panel of 105 kinase inhibitors covering a broad range of targets. A panel of twelve control treatments with small molecule and protein perturbagens known to induce particular types of cell stress/death was included for reference. The cells were stained with DRAQ5 (to visualize nuclei and cytoplasm) and TMRE (an indicator of mitochondrial membrane potential). The experiment was performed in biological triplicate. A subset of the data from one of the three biological replicates is presented here to illustrate some of the cellular features assayed. The complete dataset is available at http://lincs.hms.harvard.edu/mills-unpubl-2015/.