Background/Objectives: Regulated cell death (RCD), a process that relies on a series of molecular mechanisms, can be targeted to eliminate superfluous, irreversibly damaged, and potentially harmful cells. In this research, we want to better understand how the cell death pathway contributes to cancer therapy. Methods: We studied 1150 cancer cells in the Dependency Map (DepMap) database for 12 distinct cell death pathways and assessed their gene essentialities. Genes which are essential in 90% or more of cancer cell lines are called always essential, or partial essential if falling into (10%, 90%), or rare essential if they are essential in less than 10% of cancer cell lines. Results: Overall, among these 12 cell death pathways, 23, 47, and 549 genes were classified as always essential, partial essential, and rare essential, respectively. In two cell death pathways, Parthanatos, and Pyroptosis, all genes were rare essential. Among the other ten cell death pathways, Apoptosis, Autosis, Necroptosis, Efferocytosis, Ferroptosis, Mitotic cell death, Autophagy, Lysosome-dependent cell death, MPT-driven necrosis and Immunogenic, there are (10, 1, 13, 6, 3, 9, 11, 1, 1, 0) partial essential genes, and (2, 0, 3, 1, 1, 13, 4, 0, 0, 1) always essential genes. Conclusions: These cell death pathway essential genes could be viable targets for therapeutic drug development for cancer therapies.
Li et al. (2026) studied this question.