Towards a data-integrated cell

A group of researchers including Professor Harry Hemingway, Director of the Institue of Health Informatics, addressed the challenge of integrating the large amounts of molecular data available about a cell into a conceptual and computational framework.  Their findings have recently been published in Nature Communications.

In non-cancer cells and silenced in cancer cells), cancer-activated and always activated. The group specifically focussed on the presence of drivers in the genes they studied. Genes that are enriched in drivers are more frequently translated meaning that more of the corresponding protein is produced. The group found that the only genes consistently and significantly enriched in drivers were those categorised as always active which yields a novel hypothesis; that always-expressed genes are key to cancer progression rather than the genes with altered activation states in cancer and non-cancer cells.

 The researchers assessed whether these genes could be biomarkers of cancer survival by comparing the survival of two groups of patients; those with higher expression of the gene in question than a defined threshold and people with equal or lower than this threshold. The findings were that more than half of the identified genes have potential clinical relevance as biomarkers of cancer.  This methodology paves the way towards comparative integrated omics data analyses of all cells and therefore other diseases.  

This research was supported by the Farr Institute which received funding from 2013-2018.

Malod-Dognin N, Petschnigg J, Windels S, Povh J, Hemingway H, Ketteler R, Przulj N. Towards a data-integrated cell. Nature Communications 2019; 10: 805. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-08797-8