Statistical assessment and visualization of synergies for large-scale sparse drug combination datasets

BACKGROUND: Drug combinations have the potential to improve efficacy while limiting toxicity. To robustly identify synergistic combinations, high-throughput screens using full dose-response surface are desirable but require an impractical number of data points. Screening of a sparse number of doses per drug allows to screen large numbers of drug pairs, but complicates statistical assessment of synergy. Furthermore, since the number of pairwise combinations grows with the square of the number of drugs, exploration of large screens necessitates advanced visualization tools. RESULTS: We describe a statistical and visualization framework for the analysis of large-scale drug combination screens. We developed an approach suitable for datasets with large number of drugs pairs even if small number of data points are available per drug pair. We demonstrate our approach using a systematic screen of all possible pairs among 108 cancer drugs applied to melanoma cell lines. In this dataset only two dose-response data points per drug pair and two data points per single drug test were available. We used a Bliss-based linear model, effectively borrowing data from the drug pairs to obtain robust estimations of the singlet viabilities, consequently yielding better estimates of drug synergy. Our method improves data consistency across dosing thus likely reducing the number of false positives. The approach allows to compute p values accounting for standard errors of the modeled singlets and combination viabilities. We further develop a synergy specificity score that distinguishes specific synergies from those arising with promiscuous drugs. Finally, we developed a summarized interactive visualization in a web application, providing efficient access to any of the 439,000 data points in the combination matrix (http://www.cmtlab.org:3000/combo_app.html). The code of the analysis and the web application is available at https://github.com/arnaudmgh/synergy-screen. CONCLUSIONS: We show that statistical modeling of single drug response from drug combination data can help determine significance of synergy and antagonism in drug combination screens with few data point per drug pair. We provide a web application for the rapid exploration of large combinatorial drug screen. All codes are available to the community, as a resource for further analysis of published data and for analysis of other drug screens. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12859-019-2642-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.