An interpretable deep learning framework for genome-informed precision oncology

Cancers result from aberrations in cellular signalling systems, typically resulting from driver somatic genome alterations (SGAs) in individual tumours. Precision oncology requires understanding the cellular state and selecting medications that induce vulnerability in cancer cells under such conditions. To this end, we developed a computational framework consisting of two components: (1) a representation-learning component, which learns a representation of the cellular signalling systems when perturbed by SGAs and uses a biologically motivated and interpretable deep learning model, and (2) a drug-response prediction component, which predicts drug responses by leveraging the information of the cellular state of the cancer cells derived by the first component. Our cell-state-oriented framework notably improves the accuracy of predictions of drug responses compared to models using SGAs directly in cell lines. Moreover, our model performs well with real patient data. Importantly, our framework enables the prediction of responses to chemotherapy agents based on SGAs, thus expanding genome-informed precision oncology beyond molecularly targeted drugs. Precision oncology requires analysis of genomic alterations in cancer cells. Ren et al. develop an interpretable artificial intelligence framework that transforms somatic genomic alterations into representations of cellular signalling systems and accurately predicts cells’ responses to anticancer drugs.