Shared genetics between breast cancer and predisposing diseases identifies novel breast cancer treatment candidates

Current effective breast cancer treatment options have severe side effects, highlighting a need for new therapies. Drug repurposing can accelerate improvements to care, as FDA-approved drugs have known safety and pharmacological profiles. Some drugs for other conditions, such as metformin, an antidiabetic, have been tested in clinical trials for repurposing for breast cancer. Here, we exploit the genetics of breast cancer and linked predisposing diseases to propose novel drug repurposing opportunities. We hypothesize that if a predisposing disease contributes to breast cancer pathology, identifying the pleiotropic genes related to the risk of cancer could prioritize drugs, among all drugs treating a predisposing disease. We aim to develop a method to not only prioritize drugs for repurposing, but also to highlight shared etiology explaining repurposing.

We compile breast cancer's predisposing diseases from literature. For each predisposing disease, we use GWAS summary statistics data to identify genes in loci showing genetic correlation with breast cancer. Then, we use a network approach to link these shared genes to canonical pathways. Similarly, for all drugs treating the predisposing disease, we link their targets to pathways. In this manner, we are able to prioritize a list of drugs based on each predisposing disease, with each drug linked to a set of implicating pathways. Finally, we evaluate our recommendations against drugs currently under investigation for breast cancer.

We identify 84 loci harboring mutations with positively correlated effects between breast cancer and its predisposing diseases; these contain 194 identified shared genes. Out of the 112 drugs indicated for the predisposing diseases, 74 drugs can be linked to shared genes via pathways (candidate drugs for repurposing). Fifteen out of these candidate drugs are already in advanced clinical trial phases or approved for breast cancer (OR = 9.28, p = 7.99e-03, one-sided Fisher's exact test), highlighting the ability of our approach to identify likely successful candidate drugs for repurposing.

Our novel approach accelerates drug repurposing for breast cancer by leveraging shared genetics with its known predisposing diseases. The result provides 59 novel candidate drugs alongside biological insights supporting each recommendation.