Gene Co-Expression Analysis Predicts Genetic Variants Associated with Drug Responsiveness in Lung Cancer

Responsiveness to drugs is an important concern in designing personalized treatment for cancer patients. Currently genetic markers are often used to guide targeted therapy. However, deeper understanding of the molecular basis for drug responses and discovery of new predictive biomarkers for drug sensitivity are much needed. In this paper, we present a workflow for identifying condition-specific gene co-expression networks associated with responses to the tyrosine kinase inhibitor, Erlotinib, in lung adenocarcinoma cell lines using data from the Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia by combining network mining and statistical analysis. Particularly, we have identified multiple gene modules specifically co-expressed in the drug responsive cell lines but not in the unresponsive group. Interestingly, most of these modules are enriched on specific cytobands, suggesting potential copy number variation events on these loci. Our results therefore imply that there are multiple genetic loci with copy number variations associated with the Erlotinib responses. The existence of CNVs in these loci is also confirmed in lung cancer tissue samples using the TCGA data. Since these structural variations are inferred from functional genomics data, these CNVs are functional variations. These results suggest the condition specific gene co- expression network mining approach is an effective approach in predicting candidate biomarkers for drug responses.