Detecting Disease Specific Pathway Substructures through an Integrated Systems Biology Approach

In the era of network medicine, pathway analysis methods play a central role in the prediction of phenotype from high throughput experiments. In this paper, we present a network-based systems biology approach capable of extracting disease-perturbed subpathways within pathway networks in connection with expression data taken from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Our system extends pathways with missing regulatory elements, such as microRNAs, and their interactions with genes. The framework enables the extraction, visualization, and analysis of statistically significant disease-specific subpathways through an easy to use web interface. Our analysis shows that the methodology is able to fill the gap in current techniques, allowing a more comprehensive analysis of the phenomena underlying disease states