Integrating single-cell and bulk transcriptomic perturbation resources reveals complementary therapeutic spaces for drug repurposing

Abstract

Transcriptome-based drug repurposing can accelerate therapeutic discovery, but is limited by fragmented resources, inconsistent quality control, and reliance on single perturbation databases. We developed CDRPipe (Computational Drug Repurposing Pipeline), a unified framework that interrogates disease signatures against drug perturbation signatures generated by distinct experimental technologies. Specifically, CDRPipe harmonizes microarray perturbation profiles from the Connectivity Map (CMap; 1,968 quality-filtered experiments) with pseudo-bulk profiles derived from large-scale single-cell RNA sequencing experiments in the Tahoe-100M database (56,827 experiments). CDRPipe standardizes preprocessing, computes rank-based connectivity scores, and evaluates significance using empirical null models. We applied CDRPipe to 233 curated disease signatures from GEO and CREEDS and evaluated performance using known drug-disease associations from Open Targets. Single-cell-derived pseudo-bulk profiles recovered more annotated therapeutics than microarray profiles (median recall 50.0% vs. 6.2%; Wilcoxon p < 10-{superscript 1}{superscript 1}), thought these differences partly reflect differences in drug library composition and clinical annotation coverage. Importantly, the two resources were highly complementary, with only 3.5% overlap in recovered drugs, indicating that integrating predictions across independent perturbation resources expands therapeutic coverage and enables identification of high-confidence consensus candidates. Case studies in autoimmune disease and endometriosis further demonstrate that CDRPipe recovers clinically relevant therapies while revealing technology-dependent patterns of discovery. These results show that integrating heterogeneous transcriptomic perturbation resources improves the robustness and interpretability of transcriptional drug repurposing. One Sentence SummaryIntegrating drug perturbation resources from distinct transcriptomic platforms improves the robustness and accuracy of drug repurposing predictions.