Elucidating Compound Mechanism of Action and Polypharmacology with a Large-scale Perturbational Profile Compendium

Abstract

The Mechanism of Action (MoA) of a drug is generally represented as a small, non-tissue-specific repertoire of high-affinity binding targets. Yet, drug activity and polypharmacology are increasingly associated with a broad range of off-target and tissue-specific effector proteins. To address this challenge, we have implemented an efficient integrative experimental and computational framework leveraging the systematic generation and analysis of drug perturbational profiles representing >700 FDA-approved and experimental oncology drugs, in cell lines selected as high-fidelity models of 23 aggressive tumor subtypes. Protein activity-based analyses revealed highly reproducible, drug-mediated modulation of tissue-specific targets, leading to generation of a proteome-wide polypharmacology map, characterization of MoA-related drug clusters and off-target effects, and identification and experimental validation of novel, tissue-specific inhibitors of undruggable oncoproteins. The proposed framework, which is easily extended to elucidating the MoA of novel small-molecule libraries, could help support more systematic and quantitative approaches to precision oncology.