Biomarker discovery by integrated joint non-negative matrix factorization and pathway signature analyses

Predictive biomarkers are important for selecting appropriate patients for particular treatments. Comprehensive genomic, transcriptomic, and pharmacological data provide clues for understanding relationships between biomarkers and drugs. However, it is still difficult to mine biologically meaningful biomarkers from multi-omics data. Here, we developed an approach for mining multi-omics cell line data by integrating joint non-negative matrix factorization (JNMF) and pathway signature analyses to identify candidate biomarkers. The JNMF detected known associations between biomarkers and drugs such as BRAF mutation with PLX4720 and HER2 amplification with lapatinib. Furthermore, we observed that tumours with both BRAF mutation and MITF activation were more sensitive to BRAF inhibitors compared to tumours with BRAF mutation without MITF activation. Therefore, activation of the BRAF/MITF axis seems to be a more appropriate biomarker for predicting the efficacy of a BRAF inhibitor than the conventional biomarker of BRAF mutation alone. Our biomarker discovery scheme represents an integration of JNMF multi-omics clustering and multi-layer interpretation based on pathway gene signature analyses. This approach is also expected to be useful for establishing drug development strategies, identifying pharmacodynamic biomarkers, in mode of action analysis, as well as for mining drug response data in a clinical setting.