Abstract PS11-04: Computational drug repositioning for the identification of new agents to sensitize drug-resistant breast tumors across treatment arms and molecular subtypes
Authors: Yu Katharine , Basu Amrita , Yau Christina , Wolf Denise , Hirst Gillian , Sit Laura , O’Grady Nicholas , Brown Thelma ,   I-SPY 2 TRIAL Investigators, DeMichele Angela , Berry Don , Hylton Nola , Yee Doug , Esserman Laura , van 't Veer Laura , Sirota Marina 
Published: February 2021

Introduction: One of the principal limiting factors to achieving cures in patients with cancer is drug resistance. Drug repositioning is the application of FDA-approved drug compounds for novel indications beyond the scope of the drug’s original intended use. This approach offers advantages over traditional drug development by reducing development costs and providing shorter paths to approval, as drug safety has already been established during the drug’s original regulatory process. One approach for computational drug repositioning involves generating a disease gene expression signature and then identifying a drug that can reverse this disease signature. In this study, we extracted drug resistance signatures from the I-SPY 2 TRIAL by comparing gene expression profiles of responder and non-responder patients stratified by treatment and molecular subtype. We then applied our drug repositioning pipeline to predict compounds that can reverse the gene expression profiles of these drug resistance signatures. We hypothesize that reversing these drug resistance signatures will resensitize tumors to treatment and improve patient outcome.

Methods: We first generated the drug resistance signatures by performing differential expression between responders (RCB 0/I) and non-responders (RCB III) within treatment arms and molecular subtypes. An optimal log fold-change cutoff was selected for each signature by identifying the cutoff that best separates the responder and non-responder samples using k-means clustering. We then applied our drug repositioning pipeline to identify compounds that significantly reverse these signatures using the drug perturbation profiles generated in a breast cancer cell line in the Connectivity Map v2 dataset. Briefly, the pipeline uses a non- parametric, rank-based pattern-matching strategy based on the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) statistic to assess the enrichment of resistance genes in a ranked drug gene expression list. Significance of each prediction is estimated from a null distribution of scores generated from random gene signatures.

Results: We found that few individual genes are shared among the resistance signatures across the treatment arms and molecular subtypes, with the most common genes present in only 5/17 of the treatment arm and molecular subtype groups. At the pathway-level, however, we found that immune-related pathways are generally enriched among the responders and estrogen-response pathways are generally enriched among the non-responders. Although most of our drug predictions are unique to treatment arms and molecular subtypes, our drug repositioning pipeline identified the selective estrogen receptor degrader (SERD) fulvestrant as a compound that can potentially reverse resistance across a majority of the treatment arms and molecular subtypes.

Conclusion: We applied our drug repositioning pipeline to identify novel agents to sensitize drug-resistant tumors in the I-SPY 2+ clinical trial and identified a SERD, fulvestrant, as a potential candidate for multiple molecular subtypes and treatment arms.

Citation Format: Katharine Yu, Amrita Basu, Christina Yau, Denise Wolf, Gillian Hirst, Laura Sit, Nicholas O’Grady, Thelma Brown, I-SPY 2 TRIAL Investigators, Angela DeMichele, Don Berry, Nola Hylton, Doug Yee, Laura Esserman, Laura van 't Veer, Marina Sirota. Computational drug repositioning for the identification of new agents to sensitize drug-resistant breast tumors across treatment arms and molecular subtypes [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2020 San Antonio Breast Cancer Virtual Symposium; 2020 Dec 8-11; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2021;81(4 Suppl):Abstract nr PS11-04.