siRNA smart pool silencing of master regulators of Follicular Lymphoma transformation to DLBCL

Follicular lymphoma (FL) is the most common indolent subtype of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, with relatively long overall survival rate ranging from 6 to 10 years from time of diagnosis. However, 20-60% of FL patients undergo transformation to aggressive diffuse large B cell lymphoma (DLBCL), with a reduced median survival of about 1.2 years. The specific functional and genetic determinants of FL transformation are still elusive and only a relatively small fraction of the cases is accounted for by established, recurrent alterations in TP53, MYC and BCL6, inactivation of CDKN2A and CDKN2B, or amplification of REL. We addressed this deficiency by performing systematic analysis of a B cell specific regulatory model with FL transformation signatures, using the Master Regulator Inference algorithm (MARINa). We show that the candidate master regulators inferred by the algorithm in FL induce synthetic lethality in DLBCL cells and lead to identification of specific compound combinations inducing synergistic loss of viability in transformed DLBCL cells RNA was obtained from 45 samples, which included siRNA silencing of 5 single transcription factors, 5 combinations of two transcription factors and non-target control in triplicates.