metascreen: A modular tool for the design and analysis of drug combination screens

There is a rapidly growing interest in high-throughput drug combination screening to identify synergizing drug interactions for treatment of various maladies, such as cancer and infectious disease. This creates the need for pipelines that can be used to design such screens, perform quality control on the data, and generate data files that can be analyzed by synergy-finding bioinformatics applications. metascreen is an open source, end-to-end modular tool available as an R-package for the design and analysis of drug combination screens. The tool allows for a customized build of pipelines through its modularity and provides a flexible approach to quality control and data analysis. metascreen is adaptable to various experimental requirements with an emphasis on precision medicine. It can be coupled to other R packages, such as bayesynergy, to identify synergistic and antagonistic drug interactions in cell lines or patient samples. metascreen is scalable and provides a complete solution for setting up drug sensitivity screens, read raw measurements and consolidate different datasets, perform various types of quality control, and analyze, report and visualize the results of drug sensitivity screens. Availability and implementationThe R-package and technical documentation is available at https://github.com/Enserink-lab; the R source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Enserink-lab/metascreen under GNU General Public License v3.0; bayesynergy is accessible at https://github.com/ocbe-uio/bayesynergy/ Selected modules will be available through Galaxy, an open-source platform for FAIR data analysis, Norway: https://usegalaxy.no