Comprehensive analysis of normal adjacent to tumor transcriptomes.

Histologically normal tissue adjacent to the tumor (NAT) is commonly used as a control in cancer studies. However, little is known about the transcriptomic profile of NAT, how it is influenced by the tumor, and how the profile compares with non-tumor-bearing tissues. Here, we integrate data from the Genotype-Tissue Expression project and The Cancer Genome Atlas to comprehensively analyze the transcriptomes of healthy, NAT, and tumor tissues in 6506 samples across eight tissues and corresponding tumor types. Our analysis shows that NAT presents a unique intermediate state between healthy and tumor. Differential gene expression and protein-protein interaction analyses reveal altered pathways shared among NATs across tissue types. We characterize a set of 18 genes that are specifically activated in NATs. By applying pathway and tissue composition analyses, we suggest a pan-cancer mechanism of pro-inflammatory signals from the tumor stimulates an inflammatory response in the adjacent endothelium

Tracing diagnosis trajectories over millions of patients reveal an unexpected risk in schizophrenia.

The identification of novel disease associations using big-data for patient care has had limited success. In this study, we created a longitudinal disease network of traced readmissions (disease trajectories), merging data from over 10.4 million inpatients through the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project, which allowed the representation of disease progression mapping over 300 diseases. From these disease trajectories, we discovered an interesting association between schizophrenia and rhabdomyolysis, a rare muscle disease (incidence < 1E-04) (relative risk, 2.21 [1.80-2.71, confidence interval = 0.95], P-value 9.54E-15). We validated this association by using independent electronic medical records from over 830,000 patients at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) medical center. A case review of 29 rhabdomyolysis incidents in schizophrenia patients at UCSF demonstrated that 62% are idiopathic, without the use of any drug known to lead to this adverse event, suggesting a warning to physicians to watch for this unexpected risk of schizophrenia. Large-scale analysis of disease trajectories can help physicians understand potential sequential events in their patients

Supercomputer-aided Drug Repositioning at Scale: Virtual Screening for SARS-CoV-2 Protease Inhibitor

Coronavirus diseases (COVID-19) outbreak has been labelled a pandemic. For the prioritization of treatments to cope with COVID-19, it is important to conduct rapid high-throughput screening of chemical compounds to repurposing the approved drugs, such as repositioning of chloroquine (Malaria drug) for COVID-19. In this study, exploiting supercomputer resource, we conducted high-throughput virtual screening for potential repositioning candidates of the protease inhibitor of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Using the three dimensional structure of main protease (Mpro) of SARS-CoV-2, we evaluated binding affinity between Mpro and drug candidates listed in SWEETLEAD library and ChEMBL database. Docking scores of 19,168 drug molecules at the active site of Mpro were calculated using Autodock Vina package. Among the calculated result, we selected 43 drug candidates and ran molecular dynamics (MD) simulation to further investigate protein-drug interaction. Among compounds that bind to the active site of SARS-CoV-2, we finally selected the 8 drugs showing the highest binding affinity; asunaprevir, atazanavir, dasabuvir, doravirine, fosamprenavir, ritonavir, voxilaprevir and amprenavir, which are the antiviral drugs of hepatitis C virus or human immunodeficiency virus. We expect that the present study provides comprehensive insights into the development of antiviral medication, especially for the treatment of COVID-19.* Attached excel file contains a full list of results of docking calculations</div

Comparing Ethnicity-Specific Reference Intervals for Clinical Laboratory Tests from EHR Data

BackgroundThe results of clinical laboratory tests are an essential component of medical decision-making. To guide interpretation, test results are returned with reference intervals defined by the range in which the central 95% of values occur in healthy individuals. Clinical laboratories often set their own reference intervals to accommodate variation in local population and instrumentation. For some tests, reference intervals change as a function of sex, age, and self-identified race and ethnicity.MethodsIn this work, we develop a novel approach, which leverages electronic health record data, to identify healthy individuals and tests for differences in laboratory test values between populations.ResultsWe found that the distributions of &gt;50% of laboratory tests with currently fixed reference intervals differ among self-identified racial and ethnic groups (SIREs) in healthy individuals.ConclusionsOur results confirm the known SIRE-specific differences in creatinine and suggest that more research needs to be done to determine the clinical implications of using one-size-fits-all reference intervals for other tests with SIRE-specific distributions

Reversal of cancer gene expression correlates with drug efficacy and reveals therapeutic targets.

The decreasing cost of genomic technologies has enabled the molecular characterization of large-scale clinical disease samples and of molecular changes upon drug treatment in various disease models. Exploring methods to relate diseases to potentially efficacious drugs through various molecular features is critically important in the discovery of new therapeutics. Here we show that the potency of a drug to reverse cancer-associated gene expression changes positively correlates with that drug's efficacy in preclinical models of breast, liver and colon cancers. Using a systems-based approach, we predict four compounds showing high potency to reverse gene expression in liver cancer and validate that all four compounds are effective in five liver cancer cell lines. The in vivo efficacy of pyrvinium pamoate is further confirmed in a subcutaneous xenograft model. In conclusion, this systems-based approach may be complementary to the traditional target-based approach in connecting diseases to potentially efficacious drugs