Lethal logic

Following the success of the PARP inhibitors in the clinic, researchers are now rushing to find more synthetic lethal interactions that can be exploited for therapeutic or diagnostic uses. A Stanford University team has risen to the challenge of how to find the relationships systematically by using Boolean logic on genomic and transcriptomic data from primary tumors.

In a paper published in Nature Communications, the team developed a bioinformatics screening platform to scour primary cancer datasets for synthetic lethal pairs -- a strategy it believes will identify more disease-relevant hits than cell line-based assays...