Modeling Dabrafenib Response Using Multi-Omics Modality Fusion and Protein Network Embeddings Based on Graph Convolutional Networks
This addresses the problem of accurate drug response prediction for precision oncology, though it appears incremental as it combines existing techniques (GCN and attention mechanisms) in a new application.
This study developed a model to predict Dabrafenib sensitivity in cancer cells by integrating multiple omics layers with protein network embeddings using Graph Convolutional Networks, achieving an R² of around 0.96 with selective fusion of proteomics and transcriptomics data.
Cancer cell response to targeted therapy arises from complex molecular interactions, making single omics insufficient for accurate prediction. This study develops a model to predict Dabrafenib sensitivity by integrating multiple omics layers (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, epigenomics, and metabolomics) with protein network embeddings generated using Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN). Each modality is encoded into low dimensional representations through neural network preprocessing. Protein interaction information from STRING is incorporated using GCN to capture biological topology. An attention based fusion mechanism assigns adaptive weights to each modality according to its relevance. Using GDSC cancer cell line data, the model shows that selective integration of two modalities, especially proteomics and transcriptomics, achieves the best test performance (R2 around 0.96), outperforming all single omics and full multimodal settings. Genomic and epigenomic data were less informative, while proteomic and transcriptomic layers provided stronger phenotypic signals related to MAPK inhibitor activity. These results show that attention guided multi omics fusion combined with GCN improves drug response prediction and reveals complementary molecular determinants of Dabrafenib sensitivity. The approach offers a promising computational framework for precision oncology and predictive modeling of targeted therapies.