Integrative Analysis for Identifying Multi-Layer Modules in Precision Medicine

Abstract

Precision medicine aims to employ information from all modalities to develop a comprehensive view of disease progression and administer therapies tailored to the individual patient. A set of genomic features (gene CNVs, mutations, mRNA expressions, and protein abundances) is associated with each patient and it is hard to explain the phenotypic similarities such as gene essentiality or variability in drug response in a single genomic level. Thus, to extract biological principles it is critical to seek mutual information from multi-dimensional datasets. To address these concerns, we first conduct an integrated mRNA/protein analysis in both breast cancer cell lines and tumors, and most interestingly in the breast cancer subtypes. We identified cell lines that provide optimum heterogeneity models for studying the underlying biological processes of tumors. Our systematic observation across multi-omics data identifies distinct subgroups of cancer cells and patients. Based on this identified signal transduction between mRNA and RPPA, we developed a biclustering model to characterize key genetic alterations that are shared in both cancer cell lines and patients. We integrated two types of omics data including copy number variations, transcriptome, and proteome. Bi-EB adopts a data-driven statistics strategy by using Expected-Maximum (EM) algorithm to extract the foreground bicluster pattern from its background noise data in an iterative search. Using Bi-EB algorithm we selected translational gene sets that are characterized by highly correlated molecular profiles among RNA and proteins. To further investigate cell line and tissue in breast cancer we explore the relationship vii between genomic features and the phenotypic factors. Using in vitro/in vivo drug screening data, we adopt partial least square regression method and develop a multi-modular approach to predict anticancer therapy benefits for ER-negative breast cancer patients. The identified joint multi-dimensional modules here provide us new insights into the molecular mechanisms of drugs and cancer treatment.