Protein-protein interaction reveals synergistic discrimination of cancer phenotype

Cancer is a disease associated with the deregulation of multiple gene networks. Microarray data has permitted researchers to identify gene panel markers for diagnosis or prognosis of cancer but these are not sufficient to make specific mechanistic assertions about phenotype switches. We propose a strategy to identify putative mechanisms of cancer phenotypes by protein-protein interactions (PPI). We first extracted the logic status of a PPI via the relative expression of the corresponding gene pair. The joint association of a gene pair on a cancer phenotype was calculated by entropy minimization and assessed using a support vector machine. A typical predictor is "If Src high-expression, and Cav-1 low-expression, then cancer." We achieved 90% accuracy on test data with a majority of predictions associated with the MAPK pathway, focal adhesion, apoptosis and cell cycle. Our results can aid in the development of phenotype discrimination biomarkers and identification of putative therapeutic interference targets for drug development.