Bioinformatics

TIMMA-R: an R package for predicting synergistic multi-targeted drug combinations in cancer cell lines or patient-derived samples

He, L., Wennerberg, K., Aittokallio, T., Tang, J..

Summary: Network pharmacology-based prediction of multi-targeted drug combinations is becoming a promising strategy to improve anticancer efficacy and safety. We developed a logic-based network algorithm, called Target Inhibition Interaction using Maximization and Minimization Averaging (TIMMA), which predicts the effects of drug combinations based on their binary drug-target interactions and single-drug sensitivity profiles in a given cancer sample. Here, we report the R implementation of the algorithm (TIMMA-R), which is much faster than the original MATLAB code. The major extensions include modeling of multiclass drug-target profiles and network visualization. We also show that the TIMMA-R predictions are robust to the intrinsic noise in the experimental data, thus making it a promising high-throughput tool to prioritize drug combinations in various cancer types for follow-up experimentation or clinical applications.

Availability and implementation: TIMMA-R source code is freely available at http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/timma/.

Contact: jing.tang@helsinki.fi

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.