Fig. 2. Influence of the similarity between target proteins on drug synergy.

a We selected common targets from AstraZeneca DREAM and GDSC data sets. b The target functional similarity is the correlation between 2 targets by their interactions with the PROGENy pathways. A correlation of 1 implies that the activities of pathways correlates in the same way with drug efficacy on those proteins. A correlation of −1 implies opposite effects. The average synergy is computed for each target pair, as the mean of the top three synergistic drug-cell line pairs. We chose a threshold of 20 as a synergistic effect, and a score lower than −20 as an antagonistic effect, as in Menden et al.¹⁶. The blue line represents the loess smoothing.