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

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.Peer reviewe

Factors affecting the accuracy of a class prediction model in gene expression data

BACKGROUND: Class prediction models have been shown to have varying performances in clinical gene expression datasets. Previous evaluation studies, mostly done in the field of cancer, showed that the accuracy of class prediction models differs from dataset to dataset and depends on the type of classification function. While a substantial amount of information is known about the characteristics of classification functions, little has been done to determine which characteristics of gene expression data have impact on the performance of a classifier. This study aims to empirically identify data characteristics that affect the predictive accuracy of classification models, outside of the field of cancer. RESULTS: Datasets from twenty five studies meeting predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria were downloaded. Nine classification functions were chosen, falling within the categories: discriminant analyses or Bayes classifiers, tree based, regularization and shrinkage and nearest neighbors methods. Consequently, nine class prediction models were built for each dataset using the same procedure and their performances were evaluated by calculating their accuracies. The characteristics of each experiment were recorded, (i.e., observed disease, medical question, tissue/cell types and sample size) together with characteristics of the gene expression data, namely the number of differentially expressed genes, the fold changes and the within-class correlations. Their effects on the accuracy of a class prediction model were statistically assessed by random effects logistic regression. The number of differentially expressed genes and the average fold change had significant impact on the accuracy of a classification model and gave individual explained-variation in prediction accuracy of up to 72% and 57%, respectively. Multivariable random effects logistic regression with forward selection yielded the two aforementioned study factors and the within class correlation as factors affecting the accuracy of classification functions, explaining 91.5% of the between study variation. CONCLUSIONS: We evaluated study- and data-related factors that might explain the varying performances of classification functions in non-cancerous datasets. Our results showed that the number of differentially expressed genes, the fold change, and the correlation in gene expression data significantly affect the accuracy of class prediction models

The role of stem cell transplantation in the management of relapsed follicular lymphoma in the era of targeted therapies

Patients with relapsed follicular lymphoma (FL) following first-line therapy have an increasing number of management strategies ranging from observation through to stem cell transplantation. There has been an exciting expansion in novel agents to treat FL, but at present there is not a universally accepted standard of care in the relapse setting. Decision-making can be difficult for the clinician as there is a paucity of data to compare the various relapse therapies available. This review will discuss conventional therapy for relapsed FL, consider the use of novel agents and explore the role and timing of autologous and allogeneic stem cell transplantation