A team of scientists led by University of Montana cell biologist Mark Grimes has identified networks inside lung cancer cells that will help understand this cancer and fight it with drug treatments.

The paper, published as the cover article of Science Signaling, sheds light on how a new class of drugs called HSP90 inhibitors - which are currently in clinical trials - works to fight cancer.

It is the first large-scale study to analyze three different kinds of protein modifications simultaneously while also employing new methods that involve mathematical and computational approaches and networks to analyze these data.

Compared to all other cancers, lung cancer is still the most deadly, despite reductions in recent years due to decreases in cigarette smoking.

Lung cancer is expected to kill about 150,000 people in the United States this year, according to the American Cancer Society.

The study began with scientists at Cell Signaling Technology, who collected a large amount of data from lung cancer cells.

The approach to analyze the data builds on previous work from the Grimes laboratory.

"Proteins modify each other in different ways inside cells to convey signals," Grimes said. "The signals tell cells to divide, differentiate or die. Cancer is many diseases, and many types of cancer are caused by screwed up cell signalling mechanisms. This study defines these signalling pathways with greater precision and integrates pathways that use different protein modifications."

The study looked at 45 different lung cancer cell types and compared their modified proteins to normal lung tissue.

To make sense of the large amount of data, sophisticated pattern recognition techniques - including machine-learning algorithms - were used, and patterns in protein modifications were combined with protein interaction networks to define cell signaling pathways in lung cancer cells.

Grimes' research team includes three UM students and two other UM faculty members: Travis Wheeler from the Department of Computer Science and Ekaterina Smirnova from the Department of Mathematical Sciences.

The team also included computational biologist Avi Ma'ayan and his team from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York; and scientists from Cell Signaling Technology, Danvers, MA led by Michael Comb.

Grimes emphasized that this research is a team effort.

"Progress is made when people with different skills come together to tackle a hard problem," he said. "It was gratifying to involve UM graduate and undergraduate students Lauren Foltz, Jeremiah Gaiser and William Cook, who each contributed uniquely to the project."

Source: University of Montana