Cancer Pathways Found With 'Crosstalk' Pathway Enrichment Approach

In Genome Medicine, a team from Nanjing University of Aeronautics, Thomas Jefferson University's Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center, and elsewhere describes a "crosstalk"-based pathway enrichment method known as CTpathway, which rapidly focuses in on key pathways based on data ranging from differential gene expression data to protein and transcription factor interactions based on bulk and/or single-cell RNA sequence and other data. When the researchers used CTpathway to assess thousands of expression profiles representing cancer or blood tissues, for example, they unearthed known cancer risk pathways, along with pathways not linked to the cancer types considered in the past. "CTpathway recapitulates known risk pathways and exclusively identifies several previously unreported critical pathways for individual cancer types," the authors report, noting that the approach "outperforms other methods in identifying risk pathways across all cancer stages, including early-stage cancer with a small number of differentially expressed genes."