objectiveRadiation therapy is among the most effective and widely used modalities of cancer therapy in current clinical practice. In this era of personalized radiation medicine, high-throughput data now provide the means to investigate novel biomarkers of radiation response. Large-scale efforts have identified several radiation response signatures, which poses two challenges, namely, their analytical validity and redundancy of gene signatures.

methodsTo address these fundamental radiogenomics questions, we curated a database of gene expression signatures predictive of radiation response under oxic and hypoxic conditions.

resultsWe obtained a set of miRNA highly associated both positively and negatively to the hypoxia gene signatures, across pan-cancer. In addition, we identified moderate correlations between breast cancer oxic signatures in patient data, and significant differences across molecular subtypes. Moreover, we also found that different set of pathways to be enriched using the head and neck hypoxia signatures, although, they are found to be concordant when applied on the patient data.

conclusionThis valuable, curated repertoire of published gene expression signatures provides motivating case studies for how to search for similarities in radiation response for tumours arising from different tissues across model systems under oxic and hypoxic conditions, and how a well-curated set of gene signatures can be used to generate novel biological hypotheses about the functions of non-coding RNA. ADVANCES IN KNOWLEDGE: We envision that