RePhine: An Integrative Method for Identification of Drug Response-related Transcriptional Regulators

Transcriptional regulators(TRs)participate in essential processes in cancer pathogenesis and are critical therapeutic targets.Identification of drug response-related TRs from cell line-based compound screening data is often challenging due to low m RNA abundance of TRs,protein modifications,and other confounders(CFs).In this study,we developed a regression-based pharmacogenomic and Ch IP-seq data integration method(Re Phine)to infer the impact of TRs on drug response through integrative analyses of pharmacogenomic and Ch IP-seq data.Re Phine was evaluated in simulation and pharmacogenomic data and was applied to pan-cancer datasets with the goal of biological discovery.In simulation data with added noises or CFs and in pharmacogenomic data,Re Phine demonstrated an improved performance in comparison with three commonly used methods(including Pearson correlation analysis,logistic regression model,and gene set enrichment analysis).Utilizing Re Phine and Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia data,we observed that Re Phinederived TR signatures could effectively cluster drugs with different mechanisms of action.Re Phine predicted that loss-offunction of EZH2/PRC2 reduces cancer cell sensitivity toward the BRAF inhibitor PLX4720.Experimental validation confirmed that pharmacological EZH2 inhibition increases the resistance of cancer cells to PLX4720 treatment.Our results support that Re Phine is a useful tool for inferring drug response-related TRs and for potential therapeutic applications.The source code for Re Phine is freely available at https://github.com/coexps/Re Phine.