Cells within a tumor microenvironment (TME) dynamically communicate and influence each other's cellular states through an intercellular communication network (ICN). In cancers, intercellular communications underlie immune evasion mechanisms of individual tumors. We developed an individualized causal analysis framework for discovering tumor specific ICNs. Using head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) tumors as a testbed, we first mined single-cell RNA-sequencing data to discover gene expression modules (GEMs) that reflect the states of transcriptomic processes within tumor and stromal single cells. By deconvoluting bulk transcriptomes of HNSCC tumors profiled by The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), we estimated the activation states of these transcriptomic processes in individual tumors. Finally, we applied individualized causal network learning to discover an ICN within each tumor. Our results show that cellular states of cells in TMEs are coordinated through ICNs that enable multi-way communications among epithelial, fibroblast, endothelial, and immune cells. Further analyses of individual ICNs revealed structural patterns that were shared across subsets of tumors, leading to the discovery of 4 different subtypes of networks that underlie disparate TMEs of HNSCC. Patients with distinct TMEs exhibited significantly different clinical outcomes. Our results show that the capability of estimating individual ICNs reveals heterogeneity of ICNs and sheds light on the importance of intercellular communication in impacting disease development and progression.

Cancer is mainly caused by somatic genome alterations (SGAs). Precision oncology involves identifying and targeting tumor-specific aberrations resulting from causative SGAs. We developed a novel tumor-specific computational framework that finds the likely causative SGAs in an individual tumor and estimates their impact on oncogenic processes, which suggests the disease mechanisms that are acting in that tumor. This information can be used to guide precision oncology. We report a tumor-specific causal inference (TCI) framework, which estimates causative SGAs by modeling causal relationships between SGAs and molecular phenotypes (e.g., transcriptomic, proteomic, or metabolomic changes) within an individual tumor. We applied the TCI algorithm to tumors from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and estimated for each tumor the SGAs that causally regulate the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in that tumor. Overall, TCI identified 634 SGAs that are predicted to cause cancer-related DEGs in a significant number of tumors, including most of the previously known drivers and many novel candidate cancer drivers. The inferred causal relationships are statistically robust and biologically sensible, and multiple lines of experimental evidence support the predicted functional impact of both the well-known and the novel candidate drivers that are predicted by TCI. TCI provides a unified framework that integrates multiple types of SGAs and molecular phenotypes to estimate which genome perturbations are causally influencing one or more molecular/cellular phenotypes in an individual tumor. By identifying major candidate drivers and revealing their functional impact in an individual tumor, TCI sheds light on the disease mechanisms of that tumor, which can serve to advance our basic knowledge of cancer biology and to support precision oncology that provides tailored treatment of individual tumors.

BACKGROUND: A living cell has a complex, hierarchically organized signaling system that encodes and assimilates diverse environmental and intracellular signals, and it further transmits signals that control cellular responses, including a tightly controlled transcriptional program. An important and yet challenging task in systems biology is to reconstruct cellular signaling system in a data-driven manner. In this study, we investigate the utility of deep hierarchical neural networks in learning and representing the hierarchical organization of yeast transcriptomic machinery. RESULTS: We have designed a sparse autoencoder model consisting of a layer of observed variables and four layers of hidden variables. We applied the model to over a thousand of yeast microarrays to learn the encoding system of yeast transcriptomic machinery. After model selection, we evaluated whether the trained models captured biologically sensible information. We show that the latent variables in the first hidden layer correctly captured the signals of yeast transcription factors (TFs), obtaining a close to one-to-one mapping between latent variables and TFs. We further show that genes regulated by latent variables at higher hidden layers are often involved in a common biological process, and the hierarchical relationships between latent variables conform to existing knowledge. Finally, we show that information captured by the latent variables provide more abstract and concise representations of each microarray, enabling the identification of better separated clusters in comparison to gene-based representation. CONCLUSIONS: Contemporary deep hierarchical latent variable models, such as the autoencoder, can be used to partially recover the organization of transcriptomic machinery.

MOTIVATION: Model organisms play critical roles in biomedical research of human diseases and drug development. An imperative task is to translate information/knowledge acquired from model organisms to humans. In this study, we address a trans-species learning problem: predicting human cell responses to diverse stimuli, based on the responses of rat cells treated with the same stimuli. RESULTS: We hypothesized that rat and human cells share a common signal-encoding mechanism but employ different proteins to transmit signals, and we developed a bimodal deep belief network and a semi-restricted bimodal deep belief network to represent the common encoding mechanism and perform trans-species learning. These 'deep learning' models include hierarchically organized latent variables capable of capturing the statistical structures in the observed proteomic data in a distributed fashion. The results show that the models significantly outperform two current state-of-the-art classification algorithms. Our study demonstrated the potential of using deep hierarchical models to simulate cellular signaling systems. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The software is available at the following URL: http://pubreview.dbmi.pitt.edu/TransSpeciesDeepLearning/. The data are available through SBV IMPROVER website, https://www.sbvimprover.com/challenge-2/overview, upon publication of the report by the organizers. CONTACT: [email protected] SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.