Drug combination sensitivity scoring facilitates the discovery of synergistic and efficacious drug combinations in cancer
Fig 1
Drug combination cross design.
(A) The cross design to determine the drug combination sensitivity score. Compared to the full matrix design (left panel), only a single row and a single column from the matrix that correspond to the IC50 concentrations of the two drugs are utilized for the calculation of CSS (middle panel). One drug is utilized as the background drug fixed at its IC50 concentration while the other drug becomes the foreground drug with multiple doses being titrated. The resulting two dose-response curves will be summarized as the drug combination sensitivity score (CSS), from which the S synergy score can be determined as the deviation from a reference model which predicts the expected percentage inhibition effect from monotherapy dose responses. (B) Comparing the cross design with the full matrix design in terms of data size. Less materials are needed for the cross design when the size of the full matrix is two or above.