Figure 4

Targeting strategies for cancer type A. (A) The drug sorafenib targets 8 pathways in our network (red). We compared the network connectivity of the targeted pathways of each drug with the first 8 hubs (blue), and the highest connected Immune System pathways (green), with results shown in panel B. The targeted pathways have different node degrees, plotted as spheres, where the blue are the highest. All pathways that are not part of panel A table are shown in yellow. On average, the immune pathways are more connected than the pathways targeted by sorafenib. At right, illustration of the pathway network of cancer type A, with |gene correlation| ≥ 0.5. The compact structure of the network can be seen clearly by the dense area in the center, where all the immune system pathways are located. (B) The connectivity of the targeted pathways is measured by the first neighbors, the sub-network of the first neighbors, the number of nodes after deletion of the targeted pathways, and the number of 2-node circles of at least one of the targeted pathways. A list of each drug and its matching targeted pathways is given in Additional file 8.