TargetPair: A Single Cell-omics Resource of Clinical Trials-derived Therapeutical Target Combinations for Cancer...

Area of Science:

• Oncology
• Bioinformatics
• Computational Biology

Background:

• The tumor microenvironment (TME) presents significant challenges for cancer therapy.
• Multi-targeting strategies show clinical promise but often rely on empirical methods.
• Rational design of target pairs (TPs) for multi-target therapy is a priority.

Purpose of the Study:

• To address the lack of comprehensive data on clinically relevant cancer TPs and their single-cell characterization.
• To establish a manually annotated database of TPs with associated omics features.
• To facilitate the rational design of multi-target cancer therapies.

Main Methods:

• Manual annotation of TPs from drug combinations and multi-targeting drugs with evaluated anti-tumor efficacy.
• Calculation of single-cell omics features for TPs, including co-expression, distribution, and cell fractions.
• Curating single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) datasets from 55 publications.

Main Results:

• The TargetPair database contains 60 approved, 1,580 clinical-stage, and 7,424 experimental-stage TPs.
• TPs were annotated from 3,470 clinical trials and 1,396 publications.
• Omics features were derived from 3,022,556 single cells across 13 cell types, 16 cancer types, and 588 patients.

Conclusions:

• The TargetPair database provides a valuable resource for understanding TPs at the single-cell level.
• This resource can aid in the rational design of novel multi-target cancer therapies.
• The database is freely accessible online for research purposes.