Since its first release in 2017, SynergyFinder has become a widely used web-tool both for the discovery of novel synergistic drug combinations in pre-clinical model systems (e.g. cell lines or primary patient-derived cells), and for better understanding of the mechanisms of combination treatment efficacy or resistance. Currently, the search for combinatorial drug discoveries is witnessing a paradigm shift from the traditional ‘two drugs in combination’ to the more complex ‘multi-drug cocktails’. As a result, higher-order combination therapies involving three or more drugs are being investigated for multiple diseases.
To address the need for easy-to-use visual analytic platforms for higher-order drug combination data, FIMM researchers have released a new version of SynergyFinder web-application that enables the analysis of both pairwise and higher-order drug combination data. In addition to novel and improved analysis and visualization options for multi-drug combination data, SynergyFinder 2.0 implements also automated outlier detection procedure, extended curve-fitting functionality, statistical assessment of replicate measurements, as well as many other enhancements requested by the SynergyFinder users.
SynergyFinder 2.0 enables researchers to analyse and visualize multi-drug combination experiments.
“With these improvements, we hope SynergyFinder 2.0 will become even more useful tool in various applications of multi-drug combinatorial screening and precision medicine”, says FIMM PhD student Aleksandr Ianevski, the mastermind behind the original and extended version of SynergyFinder web-application.
“The upgraded tool enables systematic evaluation of the pre-clinical significance of multi-drug combinations toward their further development as effective treatment options”, says postdoctoral researcher Anil Kumar, one of the corresponding authors of the SynergyFinder 2.0. publication.
The paper describing the SynergyFinder 2.0 web-tool was published in the NAR Web Server Issue 2020. SynergyFinder is an open-source software freely available as web-tool. The software comes with example drug combination data, video tutorial and technical user instructions. The source codes of the web-application implementation are openly available in GitHub. The web-tool has been designed and tested in collaboration with the FIMM High Throughput Biomedicine (HTB) unit.
Original publication: Ianevski, A., Giri, K. A., Aittokallio, T., SynergyFinder 2.0: visual analytics of multi-drug combination synergies. Nucleic Acids Research. Web-server Issue 2020. doi:10.1093/nar/gkaa216
Further information:
Aleksandr Ianevski, FIMM PhD student
Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland FIMM, HiLIFE, University of Helsinki
Email: aleksandr.ianevski@helsinki.fi
Tero Aittokallio, PhD, professor
Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland FIMM, HiLIFE, University of Helsinki
Email: tero.aittokallio@helsinki.fi