In an effort to identify genes involved in chemosensitivity and to evaluate the functional rela tionships between genes and anticancer drugs acting by the same mechanism, a supervised machine learning approach called support vector machine (SVM) is used to associate genes with any of five predefined anticancer drug mechanistic categories. The drug activity profiles are used as training examples to train the SVM and then the gene expression profiles are used as test examples to predict their associated mechanistic categories. This method of correlating drugs and genes provides a strategy for finding novel biologically significant relationships for molec ular pharmacology.
