Community assessment of cancer drug combination screens identifies strategies for synergy prediction

In the last decade advances in genomics, uptake of targeted therapies, and the advent of personalized treatments have fueled a dramatic change in cancer care. However, the effectiveness of most targeted therapies is short lived, as tumors evolve and develop resistance. Combinations of drugs offer the potential to overcome resistance. The space of possible combinations is vast, and significant advances are required to effectively find optimal treatment regimens tailored to a patient9s tumor. DREAM and AstraZeneca hosted a Challenge open to the scientific community aimed at computational prediction of synergistic drug combinations and predictive biomarkers associated to these combinations. We released a data set comprising ~11,500 experimentally tested drug combinations, coupled to deep molecular characterization of the respective 85 cancer cell lines. Among 150 submitted approaches, those that incorporated prior knowledge of putative drug targets showed superior performance predicting drug synergy across independent data. Genomic features of best-performing models revealed putative mechanisms of drug synergy for multiple drugs in combination with PI3K/AKT pathway inhibitors.