Pathway-Driven Discovery of Rare Mutational Impact on Cancer

Identifying driver mutation is important in understanding disease mechanism and future application of custom tailored therapeutic decision. Functional analysis of mutational impact usually focuses on the gene expression level of the mutated gene itself. However, complex regulatory network may cause differential gene expression among functional neighbors of the mutated gene. We suggest a new approach for discovering rare mutations that have real impact in the context of pathway; the philosophy of our method is iteratively combining rare mutations until no more mutations can be added under the condition that the combined mutational event can statistically discriminate pathway level mRNA expression between groups with and without mutational events. Breast cancer patients with somatic mutation and mRNA expression were analyzed by our approach. Our approach is shown to sensitively capture mutations that change pathway level mRNA expression, concurrently discovering important mutations previously reported in breast cancer such as TP53, PIK3CA, and RB1. In addition, out of 15,819 genes considered in breast cancer, our approach identified mutational events of 32 genes showing pathway level mRNA expression differences.