Abstract
Aging is the primary risk factor for many cancer types, including lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD). To understand how aging-related alterations in the regulation of key cellular processes might affect LUAD risk and survival, we built individual-specific gene regulatory networks integrating gene expression, transcription factor protein-protein interaction, and sequence motif data, using PANDA/LIONESS algorithms, for non-cancerous lung samples from GTEx project and LUAD samples from TCGA. In healthy lung, pathways involved in cell proliferation and immune response were increasingly targeted with age; these aging-associated alterations were accelerated by smoking and resembled oncogenic shifts observed in LUAD. Aging-associated genes showed greater aging-biased targeting patterns in individuals with LUAD compared to healthier counterparts, a pattern suggestive of age acceleration. Using drug repurposing tool CLUEreg, we found small molecule drugs that may potentially alter the accelerating aging profiles we found. We defined a network-informed aging signature that was associated with survival in LUAD.