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Cancer drug discovery as a low rank tensor completion problem

Siruvallur Murali, V.; Agac Cobanoglu, D.; Hsieh, M.; Zinn, M.; Malladi, V. S.; Gesell, J.; Williams, N. S.; Welf, E. S.; Raj, G. V.; Cobanoglu, M. C.

2021-03-09 cancer biology
10.1101/2021.03.08.434311 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The heterogeneity of cancer necessitates developing a multitude of targeted therapies. We propose the view that cancer drug discovery is a low rank tensor completion problem. We implement this vision by using heterogeneous public data to construct a tensor of drug-target-disease associations. We show the validity of this approach computationally by simulations, and experimentally by testing drug candidates. Specifically, we show that a novel drug candidate, SU11652, controls melanoma tumor growth, including BRAFWT melanoma. Independently, we show that another molecule, TC-E 5008, controls tumor proliferation on ex vivo ER+ human breast cancer. Most importantly, we identify these chemicals with only a few computationally selected experiments as opposed to brute-force screens. The efficiency of our approach enables use of ex vivo human tumor assays as a primary screening tool. We provide a web server, the Cancer Vulnerability Explorer (accessible at https://cavu.biohpc.swmed.edu), to facilitate the use of our methodology.

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