Beyondcell: targeting cancer therapeutic heterogeneity in single-cell RNA-seq

We are excited to announce Beyondcell, a computational methodology for identifying tumour cell subpopulations with distinct drug responses in single-cell RNA-seq data and proposing cancer-specific treatments.

 

 

Beyondcell calculates an enrichment score in a collection of drug signatures, delineating therapeutic clusters (TCs) within cellular populations. Additionally, our method determines therapeutic differences among cell populations, and generates a prioritised ranking of the differential sensitivity drugs between chosen conditions to guide drug selection.

Beyondcell’s potential applications include:

• Analysing the intratumoural heterogeneity (ITH) of your experiment.
• Grouping cells into clusters of concordant drug response.
• Prioritizing cancer treatments.
• Studying changes in drug tolerance on a time series experiment.
• Identifying mechanisms of drug resistance.

A preprint has been published at bioRxiv and is available here. Beyondcell source code along with step by step tutorials are fully available here. Check Beyondcell’s thread on Twitter.