Abstract PO-066: Data standardization, integration and meta-analysis of preclinical pharmacogenomics studies for gene expression biomarker discovery

Abstract

Abstract The sparsity of predictive biomarkers for drug response remains a major impediment to the clinical success of precision oncology. Over the past decade, massive studies combining in-vitro drug screening with high-throughput molecular profiling of cancer cell lines have been published, with the goal of discovering novel predictive biomarkers for drug response. Unfortunately, inconsistencies in the data, as well as a lack of standards in the field, has effectively siloed the findings of these studies away from the clinical researchers working in precision medicine. In our previous work developing the PharmacoGx/PharmacoDB platform, we have reprocessed and curated the 7 largest pharmacogenomic studies released to date. Together, these studies profiled 760 compounds across ~1600 cell lines, in over 650,000 drug dose response experiments. Here, we present an update of this database, and describe our preliminary findings from a statistical meta-analysis of these data for the discovery of gene expression biomarkers. Our meta-analysis looked for markers consistently associated with drug response across 11 tissue types and 70 compounds found in at least 3 studies in the examined dataset. From these data, we find approximately 4338 consistent associations across studies surviving multiple hypothesis correction, in 1946 genes, across 8 tissues and 34 different drugs. The results show evidence of both drug-mechanism specific markers of response, as well as markers of multi-drug resistance phenotypes. Within lung cancer cell lines, we observe an enrichment of TGF-β signalling related genesets among markers of multi-drug sensitivity and resistance. We discuss our approach to validate these markers using organoid, in vivo and clinical datasets. Finally, we detail tools we are building for researchers to explore our database of putative biomarkers and the data supporting them; focusing on exposing our findings to the clinical precision medicine research community. Ultimately, our goal is to extract a database of high confidence preclinical associations from the consensus of published pharmacogenomic studies. This database would be the first step in translating findings from these massive preclinical studies towards novel clinically actionable biomarkers for use in the pursuit of precision cancer care. Citation Format: Petr Smirnov, Benjamin Haibe-Kains. Data standardization, integration and meta-analysis of preclinical pharmacogenomics studies for gene expression biomarker discovery [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Virtual Special Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Diagnosis, and Imaging; 2021 Jan 13-14. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Clin Cancer Res 2021;27(5_Suppl):Abstract nr PO-066.