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06 2019 Nature communications

Community assessment to advance computational prediction of cancer drug combinations in a pharmacogenomic screen.

Authors

Menden MP, Wang D, Mason MJ, Szalai B, Bulusu KC, Guan Y, Yu T, Kang J, Jeon M, Wolfinger R, Nguyen T, Zaslavskiy M, , Jang IS, Ghazoui Z, Ahsen ME, Vogel R, Neto EC, Norman T, Tang EKY, Garnett MJ, Veroli GYD, Fawell S, Stolovitzky G, Guinney J, Dry JR, Saez-Rodriguez J

Summary

The effectiveness of most cancer targeted therapies is short-lived. Tumors often develop resistance that might be overcome with drug combinations. However, the number of possible combinations is vast, necessitating data-driven approaches to find optimal patient-specific treatments. Here we report AstraZeneca’s large drug combination dataset, consisting of 11,576 experiments from 910 combinations across 85 molecularly characterized cancer cell lines, and results of a DREAM Challenge to evaluate computational strategies for predicting synergistic drug pairs and biomarkers. 160 teams participated to provide a comprehensive methodological development and benchmarking. Winning methods incorporate prior knowledge of drug-target interactions. Synergy is predicted with an accuracy matching biological replicates for >60% of combinations. However, 20% of drug combinations are poorly predicted by all methods. Genomic rationale for synergy predictions are identified, including ADAM17 inhibitor antagonism when combined with PIK3CB/D inhibition contrasting to synergy when combined with other PI3K-pathway inhibitors in PIK3CA mutant cells.

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