PIACAN: Pathway Integration and Analysis of Cancer Networks

Adrian Quintana, Vinh Nguyen, Tommy Dang, Chiquito Crasto

2020

Abstract

We developed a web-based software tool, Pathway Integration and Analysis of Cancer Networks (PIACAN), to identify key cancer genes, pathways and sub-pathways that are implicated in more than one type of cancer. PIACAN is the result of merging biological pathways associated with 15 different human cancer types mined from the Kyoto Encyclopaedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG). The Cytoscape software was used to port the mined information for pathway merging and subsequent analysis. Web-determined visualization of the merged networks was achieved by programming using the JavaScript library Data-Drive-Documents (D3). The results of PIACAN allow us a mechanistic glimpse into the potential development of secondary cancers spreading to distant tissues, following the primary tumour-localization in a specific tissue, via traversal of the blood-brain barrier. Given the similarities in biological networks between different cancers, PIACAN allows us a glimpse into the similarities in cancer development in remote tissues. PIACAN is a free, public, web-accessible resource (https://adrquint.github.io/integrated-cancer-networks/), where users can identify how and where biological pathways and/or sub-pathways, depending on the cancer type. A video-demonstration of the preliminary work can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOJ-EOY33fU. PIACAN is also developed as a knowledge-dissemination tool. In its current iteration, for each gene in the pathway, the system links to cancer gene information in KEGG, GeneCards, Gene Ontology, NCBI AceView, and Ensembl.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Quintana A., Nguyen V., Dang T. and Crasto C. (2020). PIACAN: Pathway Integration and Analysis of Cancer Networks. In Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2020) - Volume 3: BIOINFORMATICS; ISBN 978-989-758-398-8, SciTePress, pages 246-252. DOI: 10.5220/0009185902460252

in Bibtex Style

@conference{bioinformatics20,
author={Adrian Quintana and Vinh Nguyen and Tommy Dang and Chiquito Crasto},
title={PIACAN: Pathway Integration and Analysis of Cancer Networks},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2020) - Volume 3: BIOINFORMATICS},
year={2020},
pages={246-252},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0009185902460252},
isbn={978-989-758-398-8},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2020) - Volume 3: BIOINFORMATICS
TI - PIACAN: Pathway Integration and Analysis of Cancer Networks
SN - 978-989-758-398-8
AU - Quintana A.
AU - Nguyen V.
AU - Dang T.
AU - Crasto C.
PY - 2020
SP - 246
EP - 252
DO - 10.5220/0009185902460252
PB - SciTePress