Integrating Single‐Cell Transcriptome‐Wide Mendelian Randomization and Differentially Expressed Gene Analyses to Prioritize Dynamic Immune‐Related Drug Targets for Cancers (Adv. Sci. 46/2025)

Integrating Popular Human Genomics Tools for Cancer Drug Target Screening Differential expressed gene (DEG) analysis and Mendelian randomization (MR) are two widely-used human genomics tools to identify associations between genes and diseases, but have not been integrated together to strengthen causal inference in population-based studies. In their Research Article (DOI: 10.1002/advs.202507451), Jie Zheng, Qian Yang, Haoyu Liu, and co-workers propose a new concept “MR-DEG pleitropy exclusion”, which uses DEG evidence to filter out the putative causal effects of genes on diseases. By applying the concept to immune-cell RNA-seq data among cancer patients and healthy controls, 33 genes are prioritized as potential drug targets for cancers.