# Drug response and drug sensitivity (IC50, AUC)

Source: https://onco.cc/terms/drug-response-sensitivity/  
OnCo record `drug-response-sensitivity` (Term). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

Drug sensitivity is how strongly a tumour or cell line is held back by a compound; it is summarised by the concentration that halves growth (IC50) or by the area under the whole dose-response curve.

## Summary

The half maximal inhibitory concentration, IC50, measures the potency of a substance in inhibiting a biological function, the amount needed to inhibit a process by half in vitro (Wikipedia). Cell-line screens such as GDSC and CTRP report IC50, GI50 and the area under (or above) the dose-response curve for hundreds of drugs across hundreds of lines. The readouts are not interchangeable: different viability assays (CellTiter-Glo versus Syto60) and different summary statistics are a known source of disagreement between datasets.

## Fields

- Kind: Term
- Last checked: 2026-09-24
- Also known as: drug sensitivity; drug response prediction; cell-line drug sensitivity; IC50; half maximal inhibitory concentration; dose-response AUC; area under the dose-response curve; GI50; AAC
- Tags: cansim-terms

## Notes

- Listed in the CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme; CanSim page path /terms/drug-response.

## Sources

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IC50
- Yang et al., GDSC: a resource for therapeutic biomarker discovery in cancer cells (Nucleic Acids Research 2013): https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gks1111
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IC50

## Connected records

- collections: [DepMap (Cancer Dependency Map)](https://onco.cc/collections/depmap/)
- terms: [Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)](https://onco.cc/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/), [Cell lines as a proxy for patients](https://onco.cc/terms/cell-lines-as-proxy/), [Drug-response data splits: leave-cell-line-out, leave-drug-out, leave-tissue-out](https://onco.cc/terms/drug-response-splits/), [Pharmacogenomics](https://onco.cc/terms/pharmacogenomics-term/)

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JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/drug-response-sensitivity.json