Cancer network

307,066 protein-protein interactions were downloaded from HPRD [40]. Then, we used cancer biomarkers from MetaCore and COSMIC [43] to filter them. In details, we searched the keywords ‘cancer, tumor, carcinoma’ in MetaCore and retrieved 4,296 cancer related biomarkers. At the same time, we also downloaded the 507 driver mutation genes collected in the Cancer Gene Census from the website of COSMIC. All of these gene mutations in Cancer Gene Census have been proved to causally implicate in cancer. Then, for each protein-protein interaction, only if both proteins are included in MetaCore cancer biomarkers or Cancer Gene Census in COSMIC, would the protein-protein interaction be kept. Finally, we obtained 11,925 protein-protein interaction pairs, corresponding to 2,869 individual proteins. The cancer network could be built with edge presented by the protein-protein interaction, as well as the node displayed by a protein.