FP: Systematic exploration of synergistic drug pairs. Mol Syst Biol 2011

Drug synergy allows a therapeutic effect to be achieved with lower doses of component drugs. Drug synergy can result when drugs target the products of genes that act in parallel pathways (‘specific synergy’). Such cases of drug synergy should tend to correspond to synergistic genetic interaction between the corresponding target genes. Alternatively, ‘promiscuous synergy ’ can arise when one drug non-specifically increases the effects of many other drugs, for example, by increased bioavailability. To assess the relative abundance of these drug synergy types, we examined 200 pair