piTracer - Automatic reconstruction of molecular cascades for the identification of synergistic drug targets

Cancer cells frequently undergo metabolic reprogramming as a mechanism of resistance against chemotherapeutic drugs. Metabolomic profiling provides a direct readout of metabolic changes and can thus be used to identify these tumor escape mechanisms. Here, we introduce piTracer, a computational tool that uses multi-scale molecular networks to identify potential combination therapies from pre- and post-treatment metabolomics data. We first demonstrate piTracer’s core ability to reconstruct cellular cascades by inspecting well-characterized molecular pathways and previously studied associations between genetic variants and metabolite levels. We then apply a new gene ranking algorithm on differential metabolomic profiles from human breast cancer cells after glutaminase inhibition. Four of the automatically identified gene targets were experimentally tested by simultaneous inhibition of the respective targets and glutaminase. Of these combination treatments, two were be confirmed to induce synthetic lethality in the cell line. In summary, piTracer integrates the molecular monitoring of escape mechanisms into comprehensive pathway networks to accelerate drug target identification. The tool is open source and can be accessed at https://github.com/krumsieklab/pitracer.