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A community effort to assess and improve drug sensitivity prediction algorithms

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Abstract

Predicting the best treatment strategy from genomic information is a core goal of precision medicine. Here we focus on predicting drug response based on a cohort of genomic, epigenomic and proteomic profiling data sets measured in human breast cancer cell lines. Through a collaborative effort between the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Dialogue on Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods (DREAM) project, we analyzed a total of 44 drug sensitivity prediction algorithms. The top-performing approaches modeled nonlinear relationships and incorporated biological pathway information. We found that gene expression microarrays consistently provided the best predictive power of the individual profiling data sets; however, performance was increased by including multiple, independent data sets. We discuss the innovations underlying the top-performing methodology, Bayesian multitask MKL, and we provide detailed descriptions of all methods. This study establishes benchmarks for drug sensitivity prediction and identifies approaches that can be leveraged for the development of new methods.

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Figure 1: The NCI-DREAM drug sensitivity challenge.
Figure 2: Evaluation of individual drug sensitivity prediction algorithms.
Figure 3: The method implemented by the best performing team.
Figure 4: Performance comparison of data set views.
Figure 5: Prediction performance on individual drugs.

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Gene Expression Omnibus

Change history

  • 10 October 2014

    In the version of this article initially published online, in Table 1, the FDRs should all have had negative rather than positive exponents. Several citations were incorrect, including on p.1, two lines from end of page, “proposed1,3,20,21,22” should have been “proposed1,3,20–23”; p.2, first paragraph of Results, “abundance23” should have been “abundance20”; p.9, end of penultimate paragraph, “models22” should have been “models23.” The errors have been corrected for the print, PDF and HTML versions of this article.

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Acknowledgements

The data were kindly provided before publication for this challenge by J.W.G. We acknowledge the contributions of all participants in the co-organized NCI and DREAM Summit held on April 23, 2012, for the development of the challenge (http://www.the-dream-project.org/sites/the-dream-project.org/files/documents/dream7/dream_participant_list.docx). This work is supported in part by the following: MaGNeT grant (5U54CA121852-08); National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute grant U54 CA 112970; Stand Up To Cancer-American Association for Cancer Research Dream Team Translational Cancer Research grant SU2C-AACR-DT0409; Prospect Creek Foundation; Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI); and The Academy of Finland (Finnish Center of Excellence in Computational Inference Research COIN, grant nos. 251170 and 140057).

We acknowledge the computational resources provided by Aalto Science-IT project.

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Contributions

J.C.C., M.P.M., L.M.H., M.B., D.G., D.S., J.S.-R., J.J.C., J.W.G. and G.S. designed the challenge. The top-performing approach was designed by E.G., M.G., M.A., P.H., S.A.K., J.-P.M., O.K., A.H., T.A., K.W. and S.K. Data analysis for the top-performing approach was conducted by E.G., M.G., M.A., P.H., S.A.K. and S.K. M.G. and S.K. designed the Bayesian model and M.G. implemented the inference algorithm for the top-performing approach. The NCI-DREAM Community provided drug sensitivity predictions and Supplementary Note 1. descriptions. J.C.C., L.M.H. and M.P.M. performed analysis of challenge predictions. J.C.C., L.M.H., E.G., M.P.M., J.S.-R., S.K. and G.S. interpreted the results of the challenge and performed follow-up analyses for the manuscript. L.M.H., N.J.W. and J.W.G. generated experimental data. J.C.C., L.M.H., E.G., M.G., M.P.M., J.J.C., J.S.-R., S.K., J.W.G. and G.S. wrote the paper.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Samuel Kaski, Joe W Gray or Gustavo Stolovitzky.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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List of participants and affiliations appear at the end of the paper.

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Supplementary Text and Figures (download PDF )

Supplementary Figures 1–11 and Supplementary Notes 1–4 (PDF 21186 kb)

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Supplementary Tables 1–10 (XLSX 932 kb)

Supplementary Software (download ZIP )

Supplementary Software - Top performing team code. (ZIP 6 kb)

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Costello, J., Heiser, L., Georgii, E. et al. A community effort to assess and improve drug sensitivity prediction algorithms. Nat Biotechnol 32, 1202–1212 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2877

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