Patient-specific Boolean models of signalling networks guide personalised treatments

  1. Arnau Montagud  Is a corresponding author
  2. Jonas Béal
  3. Luis Tobalina
  4. Pauline Traynard
  5. Vigneshwari Subramanian
  6. Bence Szalai
  7. Róbert Alföldi
  8. László Puskás
  9. Alfonso Valencia
  10. Emmanuel Barillot
  11. Julio Saez-Rodriguez
  12. Laurence Calzone  Is a corresponding author
  1. Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Spain
  2. Institut Curie, PSL Research University, France
  3. RWTH Aachen University, Germany
  4. Semmelweis University, Hungary
  5. Astridbio Technologies Ltd, Hungary
  6. Heidelberg University, Germany

Abstract

Prostate cancer is the second most occurring cancer in men worldwide. To better understand the mechanisms of tumorigenesis and possible treatment responses, we developed a mathematical model of prostate cancer which considers the major signalling pathways known to be deregulated. We personalised this Boolean model to molecular data to reflect the heterogeneity and specific response to perturbations of cancer patients. 488 prostate samples were used to build patient-specific models and compared to available clinical data. Additionally, eight prostate cell-line-specific models were built to validate our approach with dose-response data of several drugs. The effects of single and combined drugs were tested in these models under different growth conditions. We identified 15 actionable points of interventions in one cell-line-specific model whose inactivation hinders tumorigenesis. To validate these results, we tested nine small molecule inhibitors of five of those putative targets and found a dose-dependent effect on four of them, notably those targeting HSP90 and PI3K. These results highlight the predictive power of our personalised Boolean models and illustrate how they can be used for precision oncology.

Data availability

Code (and processed data) to reproduce the analyses can be found in a dedicated GitHub (https://github.com/ArnauMontagud/PROFILE_v2), some of the code used in the work can be found in other GitHub repositories (https://github.com/sysbio-curie/PROFILE; https://github.com/sysbio-curie/Logical_modelling_pipeline).The model built can be accessed on the SuppFile1 and on BioModels and GINsim model repositories (https://www.ebi.ac.uk/biomodels/MODEL2106070001; http://ginsim.org/model/signalling-prostate-cancer).

The following previously published data sets were used

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Arnau Montagud

    Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Barcelona, Spain
    For correspondence
    arnau.montagud@bsc.es
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-7696-1241
  2. Jonas Béal

    Institut Curie, PSL Research University, Paris, France
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  3. Luis Tobalina

    Faculty of Medicine, Joint Research Centre for Computational Biomedicine (JRC-COMBINE), RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany
    Competing interests
    Luis Tobalina, is a full-time employee and shareholder of AstraZeneca..
  4. Pauline Traynard

    Institut Curie, PSL Research University, Paris, France
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  5. Vigneshwari Subramanian

    Faculty of Medicine, Joint Research Centre for Computational Biomedicine (JRC-COMBINE), RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany
    Competing interests
    Vigneshwari Subramanian, is a full-time employee of AstraZeneca..
  6. Bence Szalai

    Department of Physiology, Semmelweis University, Budapest, Hungary
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  7. Róbert Alföldi

    Astridbio Technologies Ltd, Szeged, Hungary
    Competing interests
    Róbert Alföldi, is CEO of Astridbio Technologies Ltd..
  8. László Puskás

    Astridbio Technologies Ltd, Szeged, Hungary
    Competing interests
    László Puskás, is a scientific advisor of Astridbio Technologies Ltd..
  9. Alfonso Valencia

    Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Barcelona, Spain
    Competing interests
    Alfonso Valencia, Reviewing editor, eLife.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-8937-6789
  10. Emmanuel Barillot

    Institut Curie, PSL Research University, Paris, France
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
  11. Julio Saez-Rodriguez

    Institute of Computational Biomedicine, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany
    Competing interests
    Julio Saez-Rodriguez, receives funding from GSK and Sanofi and consultant fees from Travere Therapeutics. The other authors declare no conflicts of interest.-.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-8552-8976
  12. Laurence Calzone

    Institut Curie, PSL Research University, Paris, France
    For correspondence
    Laurence.Calzone@curie.fr
    Competing interests
    No competing interests declared.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-7835-1148

Funding

European Commission (H2020-PHC-668858)

  • Arnau Montagud
  • Jonas Béal
  • Luis Tobalina
  • Pauline Traynard
  • Vigneshwari Subramanian
  • Bence Szalai
  • Róbert Alföldi
  • László Puskás
  • Emmanuel Barillot
  • Julio Saez-Rodriguez
  • Laurence Calzone

European Commission (H2020-ICT-825070)

  • Arnau Montagud
  • Alfonso Valencia

European Commission (H2020-ICT-951773)

  • Arnau Montagud
  • Alfonso Valencia
  • Emmanuel Barillot
  • Julio Saez-Rodriguez
  • Laurence Calzone

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Copyright

© 2022, Montagud et al.

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

Metrics

  • 3,547
    views
  • 577
    downloads
  • 50
    citations

Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.

Download links

A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.

Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)

Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)

Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)

  1. Arnau Montagud
  2. Jonas Béal
  3. Luis Tobalina
  4. Pauline Traynard
  5. Vigneshwari Subramanian
  6. Bence Szalai
  7. Róbert Alföldi
  8. László Puskás
  9. Alfonso Valencia
  10. Emmanuel Barillot
  11. Julio Saez-Rodriguez
  12. Laurence Calzone
(2022)
Patient-specific Boolean models of signalling networks guide personalised treatments
eLife 11:e72626.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.72626

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.72626

Further reading

    1. Computational and Systems Biology
    2. Immunology and Inflammation
    Jing Sun, Desmond Choy ... Shahram Kordasti
    Tools and Resources

    Mass cytometry is a cutting-edge high-dimensional technology for profiling marker expression at the single-cell level, advancing clinical research in immune monitoring. Nevertheless, the vast data generated by cytometry by time-of-flight (CyTOF) poses a significant analytical challenge. To address this, we describe ImmCellTyper (https://github.com/JingAnyaSun/ImmCellTyper), a novel toolkit for CyTOF data analysis. This framework incorporates BinaryClust, an in-house developed semi-supervised clustering tool that automatically identifies main cell types. BinaryClust outperforms existing clustering tools in accuracy and speed, as shown in benchmarks with two datasets of approximately 4 million cells, matching the precision of manual gating by human experts. Furthermore, ImmCellTyper offers various visualisation and analytical tools, spanning from quality control to differential analysis, tailored to users’ specific needs for a comprehensive CyTOF data analysis solution. The workflow includes five key steps: (1) batch effect evaluation and correction, (2) data quality control and pre-processing, (3) main cell lineage characterisation and quantification, (4) in-depth investigation of specific cell types; and (5) differential analysis of cell abundance and functional marker expression across study groups. Overall, ImmCellTyper combines expert biological knowledge in a semi-supervised approach to accurately deconvolute well-defined main cell lineages, while maintaining the potential of unsupervised methods to discover novel cell subsets, thus facilitating high-dimensional immune profiling.

    1. Computational and Systems Biology
    2. Ecology
    Lenore Pipes, Rasmus Nielsen
    Tools and Resources Updated

    Environmental DNA (eDNA) is becoming an increasingly important tool in diverse scientific fields from ecological biomonitoring to wastewater surveillance of viruses. The fundamental challenge in eDNA analyses has been the bioinformatical assignment of reads to taxonomic groups. It has long been known that full probabilistic methods for phylogenetic assignment are preferable, but unfortunately, such methods are computationally intensive and are typically inapplicable to modern next-generation sequencing data. We present a fast approximate likelihood method for phylogenetic assignment of DNA sequences. Applying the new method to several mock communities and simulated datasets, we show that it identifies more reads at both high and low taxonomic levels more accurately than other leading methods. The advantage of the method is particularly apparent in the presence of polymorphisms and/or sequencing errors and when the true species is not represented in the reference database.