Fig. 4: Comparison of individual target set sizes with 1269 or 58 targets for three out of the six data sets that have feasible solutions.

We attempted to find feasible solutions for all patients using 58 cell surface receptors that have published ligand-mimicking peptides that have been tested in vitro or in pre-clinical models. There are feasible solutions for all patients in six data sets, but not for the brain (GSE84465), melanoma (GSE115978), and lung (E-MTAB-6149), which were displayed in previous figures. Instead, we show here results for breast and colorectal cancers, for which other analyses, such as those in Figs. 2 and 3, are in the Supplementary Notes. Some of the optimal solutions obtained on the 58-receptors restricted set are of the same size to those obtained on the whole receptors set and some are larger. For each data set, we sampled 20 replicates of either 250 cells (breast), 100 cells (colorectal) or 500 cells (head and neck). Except for the 58-gene analysis of head and neck patient J (with ITS size 1 in 6 replicates, size 2 in 11 replicates, size 3 in 3 replicates), each patient had the same ITS size in each replicate. All boxplots are drawn with the ggplot2 library function geom_boxplot, which shows the median as a horizontal line, puts the hinges at 25th and 75th percentiles and puts the whiskers at 1.5× Interquartile-Range from the nearest hinge. Source data are provided as a Source data file.