Circuits of cancer drivers revealed by convergent misregulation of transcription factor targets across tumor types

BACKGROUND: Large tumor genome sequencing projects have now uncovered a few hundred genes involved in the onset of tumorigenesis, or drivers, in some two dozen malignancies. One of the main challenges emerging from this catalog of drivers is how to make sense of their heterogeneity in most cancer types. This is key not only to understand how carcinogenesis appears and develops in these malignancies to be able to early diagnose them, but also to open up the possibility to employ therapeutic strategies targeting a driver protein to counteract the alteration of another connected driver. METHODS: Here, I focus on driver transcription factors and their connection to tumorigensis in several tumor types through the alteration of the expression of their targets. First, I explore their involvement in tumorigenesis as mutational drivers in 28 different tumor types. Then, I collect a list of downstream targets of the all driver transcription factors (TFs), and identify which of them exhibit a differential expression upon alterations of driver transcription factors. RESULTS: I identify the subset of targets of each TF most likely mediating the tumorigenic effect of their driver alterations in each tumor type, and explore their overlap. Furthermore, I am able to identify other driver genes that cause tumorigenesis through the alteration of very similar sets of targets. CONCLUSIONS: I thus uncover these circuits of connected drivers which cause tumorigenesis through the perturbation of overlapping cellular pathways in a pan-cancer manner across 15 malignancies. The systematic detection of these circuits may be key to propose novel therapeutic strategies indirectly targeting driver alterations in tumors. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13073-015-0260-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.