Half the Chromosome It Used to Be: Identifying Cancer Treatments Targeting Aneuploid Losses.

BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: Aneuploidy is near-ubiquitous in cancer and can decrease chemotherapy efficacy while also sensitizing cells to other drugs.

METHODS

To systematically identify treatment strategies that target aneuploid cancers, data were integrated from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA; 10,967 samples, 16,948 aneuploidy events) and the Broad Institute's Profiling Relative Inhibition Simultaneously in Mixtures (PRISM) screen of 578 cancer cell lines and 4518 compounds.

RESULTS

Our analyses uncovered 37,720 significant positive and negative associations linking specific aneuploidies and treatments with patient prognosis or cell viability. Within TCGA data, 22 treatments correlated with improved 5-year survival for specific aneuploid cancers, whereas 46 were linked to worse outcomes. A complementary analysis of PRISM identified 17,946 compound-aneuploidy associations and 16,189 mechanism of action (MOA)-aneuploidy associations. Pathway-altering compounds that selectively reduce viability in cells with aneuploidy profiles were discovered, including an unexpectedly prominent number of glucocorticoid receptor agonists.

CONCLUSIONS

This integrated dataset provides a resource for designing therapeutic decision hypotheses, identifying drug-repurposing opportunities, and informing future studies aimed at targeting aneuploidy-induced vulnerabilities in cancer.