SIGN: similarity identification in gene expression.

MOTIVATION: High-throughput molecular profiles of human cells have been used in predictive computational approaches for stratification of healthy and malignant phenotypes and identification of their biological states. In this regard, pathway activities have been used as biological features in unsupervised and supervised learning schemes. RESULTS: We developed SIGN (Similarity Identification in Gene expressioN), a flexible open-source R package facilitating the use of pathway activities and their expression patterns to identify similarities between biological samples. We defined a new measure, the transcriptional similarity coefficient, which captures similarity of gene expression patterns, instead of quantifying overall activity, in biological pathways between the samples. To demonstrate the utility of SIGN in biomedical research, we establish that SIGN discriminates subtypes of breast tumors and patients with good or poor overall survival. SIGN outperforms the best models in DREAM challenge in predicting survival of breast cancer patients using the data from the Molecular Taxonomy of Breast Cancer International Consortium. In summary, SIGN can be used as a new tool for interrogating pathway activity and gene expression patterns in unsupervised and supervised learning schemes to improve prognostic risk estimation for cancer patients by the biomedical research community. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: An open-source R package is available (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/SIGN/).

Spatially distinct tumor immune microenvironments stratify triple-negative breast cancers.

Understanding the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) promises to be key for optimal cancer therapy, especially in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). Integrating spatial resolution of immune cells with laser capture microdissection gene expression profiles, we defined distinct TIME stratification in TNBC, with implications for current therapies including immune checkpoint blockade. TNBCs with an immunoreactive microenvironment exhibited tumoral infiltration of granzyme B+CD8+ T cells (GzmB+CD8+ T cells), a type 1 IFN signature, and elevated expression of multiple immune inhibitory molecules including indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase (IDO) and programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1), and resulted in good outcomes. An "immune-cold" microenvironment with an absence of tumoral CD8+ T cells was defined by elevated expression of the immunosuppressive marker B7-H4, signatures of fibrotic stroma, and poor outcomes. A distinct poor-outcome immunomodulatory microenvironment, hitherto poorly characterized, exhibited stromal restriction of CD8+ T cells, stromal expression of PD-L1, and enrichment for signatures of cholesterol biosynthesis. Metasignatures defining these TIME subtypes allowed us to stratify TNBCs, predict outcomes, and identify potential therapeutic targets for TNBC.

Predictive approaches for drug combination discovery in cancer.

Drug combinations have been proposed as a promising therapeutic strategy to overcome drug resistance and improve efficacy of monotherapy regimens in cancer. This strategy aims at targeting multiple components of this complex disease. Despite the increasing number of drug combinations in use, many of them were empirically found in the clinic, and the molecular mechanisms underlying these drug combinations are often unclear. These challenges call for rational, systematic approaches for drug combination discovery. Although high-throughput screening of single-agent therapeutics has been successfully implemented, it is not feasible to test all possible drug combinations, even for a reduced subset of anticancer drugs. Hence, in vitro and in vivo screening of a large number of drug combinations are not practical. Therefore, devising computational methods to efficiently explore the space of drug combinations and to discover efficacious combinations has attracted a lot of attention from the scientific community in the past few years. Nevertheless, in the absence of consensus regarding the computational approaches used to predict efficacious drug combinations, a plethora of methods, techniques and hypotheses have been developed to date, while the research field lacks an elaborate categorization of the existing computational methods and the available data sources. In this manuscript, we review and categorize the state-of-the-art computational approaches for drug combination prediction, and elaborate on the limitations of these methods and the existing challenges. We also discuss about the recent pan-cancer drug combination data sets and their importance in revising the available methods or developing more performant approaches.

Tissue specificity of in vitro drug sensitivity.

Objectives: We sought to investigate the tissue specificity of drug sensitivities in large-scale pharmacological studies and compare these associations to those found in drug clinical indications. Materials and Methods: We leveraged the curated cell line response data from PharmacoGx and applied an enrichment algorithm on drug sensitivity values' area under the drug dose-response curves (AUCs) with and without adjustment for general level of drug sensitivity. Results: We observed tissue specificity in 63% of tested drugs, with 8% of total interactions deemed significant (false discovery rate <0.05). By restricting the drug-tissue interactions to those with AUC > 0.2, we found that in 52% of interactions, the tissue was predictive of drug sensitivity (concordance index > 0.65). When compared with clinical indications, the observed overlap was weak (Matthew correlation coefficient, MCC = 0.0003, P > .10). Discussion: While drugs exhibit significant tissue specificity in vitro, there is little overlap with clinical indications. This can be attributed to factors such as underlying biological differences between in vitro models and patient tumors, or the inability of tissue-specific drugs to bring additional benefits beyond gold standard treatments during clinical trials. Conclusion: Our meta-analysis of pan-cancer drug screening datasets indicates that most tested drugs exhibit tissue-specific sensitivities in a large panel of cancer cell lines. However, the observed preclinical results do not translate to the clinical setting. Our results suggest that additional research into showing parallels between preclinical and clinical data is required to increase the translational potential of in vitro drug screening.