TargetPair: A Single Cell-omics Resource of Clinical Trials-derived Therapeutical Target Combinations for Cancer Therapy

Abstract

The complexity of the tumor microenvironment (TME) makes cancer therapy challenging. Multi-targeting strategies often exhibit superior clinical benefits and dominate ongoing cancer clinical trials. However, existing multi-targeting strategies largely rely on empirical approaches. The rational design of target pairs (TPs) for multi-target cancer therapy development is a high priority but remains a significant challenge, which may benefit from single-cell omics technologies to decode the TME. However, there has been no thorough survey of clinically relevant cancer TPs and their characterization at the single-cell level. Here, we established the TargetPair database to address this gap by manually annotating TPs from drug combinations and multi-targeting drugs whose anti-tumor efficacy has been evaluated, and calculating their omics features at the single-cell level. The TargetPair database provides (1) 60 approved, 1,580 clinical-stage, and 7,424 experimental-stage TPs manually annotated from 3,470 clinical trials and 1,396 publications, and (2) the omics features of TPs (co-expression, distribution, expressed cell fractions, pathways, and single-cell gene networks) from manually curated scRNA-seq datasets derived from 55 pieces of literature (including 3,022,556 single cells, 13 cell types, 16 cancer types, and 588 patients). It can be freely accessed at https://www.targetpair.aiddlab.com via several search and browsing modes.