Identification of Common Driver Gene Modules and Associations between Cancers through Integrated Network Analysis

High-throughput biological data has created an unprecedented opportunity for illuminating the mechanisms of tumor emergence and evolution. An important and challenging problem in deciphering cancers is to investigate the commonalities of driver genes and pathways and the associations between cancers. Aiming at this problem, a tool ComCovEx is developed to identify common cancer driver gene modules between two cancers by searching for the candidates in local signaling networks using an exclusivity-coverage iteration strategy and outputting those with significant coverage and exclusivity for both cancers. The associations of the cancer pairs are further evaluated by Fisher's exact test. Being applied to 11 TCGA cancer datasets, ComCovEx identifies 13 significantly associated cancer pairs with plenty of biologically significant common gene modules. The novel results of cancer relationship and common gene modules reveal the relevant pathological basis of different cancer types and provide new clues to diagnosis and drug treatment in associated cancers.