The Topology of Mutated Driver Pathways

Much progress has been made, and continues to be made, towards identifying candidate mutated driver pathways in cancer. However, no systematic approach to understanding how candidate pathways relate to each other for a given cancer (such as Acute myeloid leukemia), and how one type of cancer may be similar or different from another with regard to their respective pathways (Acute myeloid leukemia vs. Glioblastoma multiforme for instance), has emerged thus far. Our work attempts to contribute to the understanding of space of pathways through a novel topological framework. We illustrate our approach, using mutation data (obtained from TCGA) of two types of tumors: Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). We find that the space of pathways for AML is homotopy equivalent to a sphere, while that of GBM is equivalent to a genus-2 surface. We hope to trigger new types of questions (i.e., allow for novel kinds of hypotheses) towards a more comprehensive grasp of cancer.