Hi, is there any easy way to find the total number of cancer dependency genes / proteins across all cancer cell lines or a rough approximation as of 2024?
I don’t know whether there is a well defined consensus around what it means to be a “cancer dependency gene”. Also, I don’t know how much evidence one needs to make that determination.
You certainly can query the depmap portal for those genes which have selective dependency profiles as an approximation.
However, there will be quite a lot of caveats with such a list. Off the top of my head: some of those are likely to be driven by lineage effects as opposed to cancer. Also the DepMap data is based on models as opposed to patient data so some may be related to media or other effects from growing models as opposed to what one sees in actual patients. Some genes will be selective in RNAi but not in CRISPR screens, so should you consider the union or the intersection, etc.
