Tumour-specific Causal Inference Discovers Distinct Disease Mechanisms Underlying Cancer Subtypes.

ABSTRACT: Cancer is a disease mainly caused by somatic genome alterations (SGAs) that perturb cellular signalling systems. Furthermore, the combination of pathway aberrations in a tumour defines its disease mechanism, and distinct disease mechanisms underlie the inter-tumour heterogeneity in terms of disease progression and responses to therapies. Discovering common disease mechanisms shared by tumours would provide guidance for precision oncology but remains a challenge. Here, we present a novel computational framework for revealing distinct combinations of aberrant signalling pathways in tumours. Specifically, we applied the tumour-specific causal inference algorithm (TCI) to identify causal relationships between SGAs and differentially expressed genes (DEGs) within tumours from the Cancer Genome

SUBMITTER: Xue Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6744493 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature