A method for subtype analysis with somatic mutations

Cancer is a highly heterogeneous disease, and virtually all types of cancer have subtypes. Understanding the association between cancer subtypes and genetic variations is fundamental to the development of targeted therapies for patients. Somatic mutation plays important roles in tumor development and has emerged as a new type of genetic variations for studying the association with cancer subtypes. However, the low prevalence of individual mutations poses a tremendous challenge to the related statistical analysis.

In this article, we propose an approach, subtype analysis with somatic mutations (SASOM), for the association analysis of cancer subtypes with somatic mutations. Our approach tests the association between a set of somatic mutations (from a genetic pathway) and subtypes, while incorporating functional information of the mutations into the analysis. We further propose a robust p-value combination procedure, DAPC, to synthesize statistical significance from different sources. Simulation studies show that the proposed approach has correct type I error and tends to be more powerful than possible alternative methods. In a real data application, we examine the somatic mutations from a cutaneous melanoma dataset, and identify a genetic pathway that is associated with immune-related subtypes.

The SASOM R package is available at https://github.com/rksyouyou/SASOM-pkg. R scripts and data are available at https://github.com/rksyouyou/SASOM-analysis.

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.