Data from A Transcriptome-Based Precision Oncology Platform for Patient–Therapy Alignment in a Diverse Set of Treatment-Resistant Malignancies

Abstract

<div>Abstract<p>Predicting <i>in vivo</i> response to antineoplastics remains an elusive challenge. We performed a first-of-kind evaluation of two transcriptome-based precision cancer medicine methodologies to predict tumor sensitivity to a comprehensive repertoire of clinically relevant oncology drugs, whose mechanism of action we experimentally assessed in cognate cell lines. We enrolled patients with histologically distinct, poor-prognosis malignancies who had progressed on multiple therapies, and developed low-passage, patient-derived xenograft models that were used to validate 35 patient-specific drug predictions. Both OncoTarget, which identifies high-affinity inhibitors of individual master regulator (MR) proteins, and OncoTreat, which identifies drugs that invert the transcriptional activity of hyperconnected MR modules, produced highly significant 30-day disease control rates (68% and 91%, respectively). Moreover, of 18 OncoTreat-predicted drugs, 15 induced the predicted MR-module activity inversion <i>in vivo</i>. Predicted drugs significantly outperformed antineoplastic drugs selected as unpredicted controls, suggesting these methods may substantively complement existing precision cancer medicine approaches, as also illustrated by a case study.</p>Significance:<p>Complementary precision cancer medicine paradigms are needed to broaden the clinical benefit realized through genetic profiling and immunotherapy. In this first-in-class application, we introduce two transcriptome-based tumor-agnostic systems biology tools to predict drug response <i>in vivo</i>. OncoTarget and OncoTreat are scalable for the design of basket and umbrella clinical trials.</p><p><i><a href="https://aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscovery/article/doi/10.1158/2159-8290.CD-13-6-ITI" target="_blank">This article is highlighted in the In This Issue feature, p. 1275</a></i></p></div>