Mapping the landscape of synthetic lethal interactions in liver cancer

Almost all the current therapies against liver cancer are based on the “one size fits all” principle and offer only limited survival benefit. Fortunately, synthetic lethality (SL) may provide an alternate route towards individualized therapy in liver cancer. The concept that simultaneous losses of two genes are lethal to a cell while a single loss is non-lethal can be utilized to selectively eliminate tumors with genetic aberrations. Methods: To infer liver cancer-specific SL interactions, we propose a computational pipeline termed SiLi (statistical inference-based synthetic lethality identification) that incorporates five inference procedures. Based on large-scale sequencing datasets, SiLi analysis was performed to identify SL interactions in liver cancer. Results: By SiLi analysis, a total of 272 SL pairs were discerned, which included 209 unique target candidates. Among these, polo-like kinase 1 (PLK1) was considered to have considerable therapeutic potential. Further computational and experimental validation of the SL pair TP53-PLK1 demonstrated that inhibition of PLK1 could be a novel therapeutic strategy specifically targeting those patients with TP53-mutant liver tumors. Conclusions: In this study, we report a comprehensive analysis of synthetic lethal interactions of liver cancer. Our findings may open new possibilities for patient-tailored therapeutic interventions in liver cancer.