Core Coefficient quantifies transcription-factor functional dominance for therapeutic target selection

Core Coefficient (CC) quantifies transcription-factor functional dominance in patient-biopsy and human post-mortem regulatory networks, revealing a limited TF Core that shifts with disease progression and treatment.

• Why it matters: Existing TF measurements do not capture how functional importance depends on a TF’s position within a specific regulatory network, making therapeutic target selection suboptimal.
• What they did: CC is a graph-theory measure applied to networks from patient-biopsy and human post-mortem datasets to infer a functional hierarchy and predict Core membership as disease progresses, and to track treatment-induced hierarchy changes.
• The result: CC shows TF dominance shifts from low to Core positions during disease progression and predicts Core re-composition, pathway reorganization, and cellular outcomes of blocking a specific TF in cancer cell lines, outperforming differential expression for general rules.