Motivation: Cancer is a genetic disease caused by mutations in a group of genes,which belong to specific signaling pathways. A cancer specific pathway is highly activated in only one single cancer while having low activation in other cancers. Understanding cancer specific pathways play an important role to discover efficient remedy for malignancies. Although several studies have been proposed to identify cancer specific pathways, they investigate signaling pathways related to cancers without considering the effect of drugs.
Results: This study introduces pathway activation score and apply it to propose a systematic method to identify druggable cancer-specific pathways (DCSPs) that mediate the action of drugs. Our analysis provides DCSPs of 23 different cancers discovered in GDSC cohort and validated in TCGA along with false discover rate (FDR) control. We further investigate the relation between DCSPs and drug responses, which mainly focus on acute myeloid leukemia(AML) - most common acute leukemia in adults. We find out 28 DCSPs strongly correlating to drug response from the GDSC cohort, which are also validated in the BeatAML cohort.
Contact: Yudi Pawitan or Trung Nghia Vu.