pathprinting: an integrative approach to understand the functional basis of disease

new strategies to combat complex human disease require systems approaches to biology that integrateexperiments from cell lines, primary tissues and model organisms. we have developed pathprint, a functionalapproach that compares gene expression profiles in a set of pathways, networks and transcriptionally regulatedtargets. it can be applied universally to gene expression profiles across species. integration of large-scale profilingmethods and curation of the public repository overcomes platform, species and batch effects to yield a standardmeasure of functional distance between experiments. we show that pathprints combine mouse and human blooddevelopmental lineage, and can be used to identify new prognostic indicators in acute myeloid leukemia.the code and resources are available at http://compbio.sph.harvard.edu/hidelab/pathprint