Personalized Drug Analysis in B Cell Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia Patients.

BACKGROUND B cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia (B-CLL) is the most common adult leukemia in the Western world. Although therapeutic advances have notably improved the outcome for many patients, B-CLL remains an incurable disease. The purpose of this study was to search for therapeutic drugs based on altered pathways in individual patients. MATERIAL AND METHODS Genes from microarray data were mapped to 300 Homo sapiens-related pathways. Individual pathway aberrance analysis was used to identify altered pathways. Drug data, obtained from connectivity map (cMAP), were subjected to drug-set enrichment analysis. To analyze the relations between drug-induced pathways and disease-induced altered pathways in individuals, Pearson correlation analysis was applied. RESULTS The disease-induced pathways with P-values <0.05 in individual samples were recorded and presented in a heatmap. Drug-induced pathways were analyzed in the 104 samples. After Pearson correlation analysis between altered pathways and drug, the 20 top-ranked drugs that were most relevant to disease were obtained. There were 9 drugs with positive scores and 11 with negative scores. CONCLUSIONS With this method, we identified the 20 top-ranked drugs that were most relevant to disease. The drugs with negative scores may play therapeutic roles in B-CLL.