To determine if a multi-analyte cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) peptide signature can be used to differentiate Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and normal aged controls (NL), and to determine if this signature can also predict progression from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to AD, analysis of CSF samples was done on the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset. The profiles of 320 peptides from baseline CSF samples of 287 subjects over a 3–6 year period were analyzed. As expected, the peptide most able to differentiate between AD vs. NL was found to be Apolipoprotein E. Other peptides, some of which are not classically associated with AD, such as heart fatty acid binding protein, and the neuronal pentraxin receptor, also differentiated disease states. A sixteen-analyte signature was identified which differentiated AD vs. NL with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.89, which was better than any combination of amyloid beta (1–42), tau, and phospho-181 tau. This same signature, when applied to a new and independent data set, also strongly predicted both probability and rate of future progression of MCI subjects to AD, better than traditional markers. These data suggest that multivariate peptide signatures from CSF predict MCI to AD progression, and point to potentially new roles for certain proteins not typically associated with AD.

Oral cancer is one of the main causes of cancer-related deaths in South-Asian countries. There are very limited treatment options available for oral cancer. Research endeavors focused on discovery and development of novel therapies for oral cancer, is necessary to control the ever rising oral cancer related mortalities. We mined the large pool of compounds from the publicly available compound databases, to identify potential therapeutic compounds for oral cancer. Over 84 million compounds were screened for the possible anti-cancer activity by custom build SVM classifier. The molecular targets of the predicted anti-cancer compounds were mined from reliable sources like experimental bioassays studies associated with the compound, and from protein-compound interaction databases. Therapeutic compounds from DrugBank, and a list of natural anti-cancer compounds derived from literature mining of published studies, were used for building partial least squares regression model. The regression model thus built, was used for the estimation of oral cancer specific weights based on the molecular targets. These weights were used to compute scores for screening the predicted anti-cancer compounds for their potential to treat oral cancer. The list of potential compounds was annotated with corresponding physicochemical properties, cancer specific bioactivity evidences, and literature evidences. In all, 288 compounds with the potential to treat oral cancer were identified in the current study. The majority of the compounds in this list are natural products, which are well-tolerated and have minimal side-effects compared to the synthetic counterparts. Some of the potential therapeutic compounds identified in the current study are resveratrol, nimbolide, lovastatin, bortezomib, vorinostat, berberine, pterostilbene, deguelin, andrographolide, and colchicine.

In India, oral cancer has consistently ranked among top three causes of cancer-related deaths, and it has emerged as a top cause for the cancer-related deaths among men. Lack of effective therapeutic options is one of the main challenges in clinical management of oral cancer patients. We interrogated large pool of samples from oral cancer gene expression studies to identify potential therapeutic targets that are involved in multiple cancer hallmark events. Therapeutic strategies directed towards such targets can be expected to effectively control cancer cells. Datasets from different gene expression studies were integrated by removing batch-effects and was used for downstream analyses, including differential expression analysis. Dependency network analysis was done to identify genes that undergo marked topological changes in oral cancer samples when compared with control samples. Causal reasoning analysis was carried out to identify significant hypotheses, which can explain gene expression profiles observed in oral cancer samples. Text-mining based approach was used to detect cancer hallmarks associated with genes significantly expressed in oral cancer. In all, 2365 genes were detected to be differentially expressed genes, which includes some of the highly differentially expressed genes like matrix metalloproteinases (MMP-1/3/10/13), chemokine (C-X-C motif) ligands (IL8, CXCL-10/-11), PTHLH, SERPINE1, NELL2, S100A7A, MAL, CRNN, TGM3, CLCA4, keratins (KRT-3/4/13/76/78), SERPINB11 and serine peptidase inhibitors (SPINK-5/7). XIST, TCEAL2, NRAS and FGFR2 are some of the important genes detected by dependency and causal network analysis. Literature mining analysis annotated 1014 genes, out of which 841 genes were statistically significantly annotated. The integration of output of various analyses, resulted in the list of potential therapeutic targets for oral cancer, which included targets such as ADM, TP53, EGFR, LYN, CTLA4, SKIL, CTGF and CD70.