Ning Zhao

Cuproptosis is a novel form of regulated cell death driven by intracellular copper accumulation, leading to lipoylated protein aggregation and Fe-S cluster destabilization. Dysregulation of this process has been implicated in various pathological conditions, including cancers, neurodegenerative diseases and metabolic diseases. Despite rapidly growing interest in cuproptosis, a systematically curated intelligent agent dedicated to cuproptosis-related genes (CRGs) and their disease associations remains lacking. To address this, we constructed a cuproptosis-related artificial intelligence (AI) knowledge base, named CuAgent, by manually curating 465 experimentally validated CRGs and 163 associated diseases. CuAgent introduces an innovative intelligent agent that enables users to perform natural language queries and receive data-driven responses. In addition, agent offers gene queries and analytical tools (expression profiling, survival analysis, protein interaction network visualization and correlation analysis). This study provides critical insights into cuproptosis progression, presenting a comprehensive and interactive resource to advance the understanding of cuproptosis. URL: https://bioinfor.nefu.edu.cn/CuAgent/home/ .

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is an aggressive hematologic malignancy characterized by profound molecular heterogeneity and high relapse rates, posing significant clinical challenges. Programmed cell death (PCD), encompassing diverse regulated modalities such as apoptosis, necroptosis, and ferroptosis, plays a key role in leukemogenesis and therapeutic response; however, a comprehensive prognostic framework integrating multi-modal PCD pathways in AML remains elusive. In this study, we performed a systematic transcriptomic analysis of 1624 genes associated with 13 distinct PCD forms. A novel computational pipeline combining a variational autoencoder (VAE) for dimensionality reduction and a multilayer perceptron (MLP) for classification was employed to identify robust PCD-related biomarkers, interpreted via SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) analysis. This approach identified 48 candidate genes with discriminative potential between AML and normal bone marrow. Unsupervised consensus clustering based on these genes delineated two molecular subtypes exhibiting divergent clinical outcomes and immune microenvironment profiles. The subtype demonstrated an immunosuppressive phenotype, characterized by enriched regulatory T cells, M2 macrophages, and elevated expression of inhibitory immune checkpoints, correlating with inferior survival. We developed an 8-gene prognostic signature (SORL1, PIK3R5, RIPK3, ELANE, GPX1, VNN1, CD74, and IL3RA) that effectively categorized patients into high- and low-risk groups with notable survival differences, validated across independent cohorts. A prognostic nomogram combining the risk score, age, and cytogenetic risk enhanced the prediction accuracy for overall survival. Our study presents an integrative model that connects multi-modal PCD pathways to AML prognosis, offering a new molecular subtyping system and a clinically applicable risk assessment tool for improved prognostication and personalized treatment strategies.

Identifying therapeutic target genes and their corresponding targeted drugs is of significant importance for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). This study proposes a multi-view graph auto-encoder model (MVGAE), which, together with the network-informed adaptive positive-unlabeled (NIAPU) and synthetic lethality multi-view graph auto-encoder (SLMGAE) model, constitutes an integrated computational framework. The framework integrates multi-source biological network data, including protein–protein interaction networks, disease-gene association information, and gene-drug bipartite graphs, for data mining. Through systematic analysis and computational screening, we ultimately predicted seven potential driver genes associated with NSCLC using the NIAPU model. The SLMGAE model predicted nine genes with synthetic lethality (SL) interactions to these driver genes as candidate therapeutic targets. Based on these SL targets, the MVGAE model further predicted corresponding targeted drugs. Notably, among the prioritized targets, existing studies indicate that ATR and RAD51 exhibit conditional SL effects in the context of functional impairment. Furthermore, several of the predicted candidate drugs (such as PAZOPANIB) have been previously reported to play a positive role in NSCLC treatment. This study highlights MVGAE as a novel computational framework for drug repurposing and demonstrates how its integration with complementary models can effectively prioritize potential therapeutic targets and candidate drugs, providing a robust computational basis for precision treatment strategies.