The "Ring" series, in both the Japanese and Hollywood incarnations, takes a cue from "Videodrome" in casting videotapes as malignant agents of infection.
Our approach is based on the existence of a population of malignant agents (strains), a stock of drugs to target them and certain measure quantifying the response of each strain to each single drug.
In many cases, however, the target of drug therapy is a heterogeneous population of malignant agents, each characterized by a different degree of aggressiveness and response to therapy.
A drug combination may also be more effective when targeting heterogeneous populations of malignant agents.
Drug resistance is a clear example, whereby an induced or preexisting subpopulation of malignant agents is not responsive to a drug, escaping treatment.
In this work we introduce a method to uncover drug combinations with a putative effective response when presented to a heterogeneous population of malignant agents (strains), such as cancer cell lines or viruses.
In the latter case, although each single drug may be only effective for a subset of the malignant agents, the drug set as a whole may cover all malignant agents.
The single agent screen data is represented by a bipartite graph, with a class of vertices representing drugs and another representing malignant agents/strains.
In our model, planned cyclophosphamide use also correlated with the use of other anti-malignant agents, which could potentially mask the contribution of these other agents to the neutropenic potential of the chemotherapy regimen.
For Plasmodium falciparum, the etiological agent of malignant tertian malaria, sexual stage differentiation (gametocytogenesis) from asexual parasites occurs in the blood of the human host.
