The first volume of the Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia (CCLE), funded by Novartis and authored by scientists at the Broad Institute, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Genomics Institute of the Novartis Foundation, and Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, is now available online. Cancer cell lines are malignant cells removed from tumor tissue and cultured in a laboratory, where under the right conditions, they can grow indefinitely.This makes them useful for performing repeated experiments. The team of scientists who compiled the encyclopedia chose 947 of the nearly 1,200 commercially available cancer cell lines with the goal of reflecting the genomic diversity of human cancers. The CCLE integrates gene expression, chromosomal copy number and parallel sequencing data from the cancer cell lines together with pharmacological profiles for 24 anticancer drugs across roughly half of these cells lines.