One frequent theory in personalized therapy is that effective treatment results from applying treatment across multiple important biological pathways. These pathways generally consist of sequentially activated gene and pro tein nodes acting as a feedback network. Treatment of individual pathways may not be selleck kinase inhibitor sufficient for majority of diseases, so multiple independent parallel pathways must be targeted to create an effective treatment. We believe that one possible approach to the analysis of multiple pathway treatment is to begin with an underlying frame work based on the Boolean interactions of the multiple targets in the pathway architecture. The approach is based on developing families of Boolean equations that describe the multiple treatment combinations capable of acting as an effective intervention strategy.

For the initial step of developing the underlying Boolean functions, an initial binarization of the data set must be performed. However, the resulting model lends itself to numerous continuous approaches to sensitivity prediction which we will explore further in the paper. Binarization of drug targets and conversion of IC50 s to sensitivities In this subsection, we present algorithms for generation of binarized drug targets and continuous sensitivity score of each drug. The inputs for the algorithms in this subsection are the EC50 s of the drug targets and the IC50 s of the drugs when applied to a tumor culture. In order to perform the binarization, we must con sider the nature of the data we are given.

In particular, we are provided with an IC50 for each drug, and an EC50 value for each kinase target inhibited by the drug. Under the assumption that the primary mechanism of tumor eradication is, in fact, the protein kinase inhibition enacted by these targeted drugs, a GSK-3 natural consequence would be the existence of a relationship between the IC50 and EC50 values. This rela tionship is explained as such, suppose for a drug Si the IC50 value of Si and the EC50 of kinase target kj, are of similar value, then it can be reasonably assumed that kinase target kj is possibly a primary mechanism in the effectiveness of the drug. In other words, if 50% inhibition of a kinase target directly correlates with 50% of the tumor cells losing viability, then inhibition of the kinase target is most likely one of the causes of cell death. Hence, the tar get that matches the drug IC50 is binarized as a target hit for the drug. The above assumption of direct correlation for all successful drugs is obviously an extremely restrictive assumption and will be unable to produce high accu racy predictions.