Back

Dose-dependent modeling of combinatorial drug responses stratifies patient survival and reveals therapeutic vulnerabilities in precision oncology

Ota, K.; Ito, T.; Shimizu, H.

2026-04-21 cancer biology
10.64898/2026.04.16.718332 bioRxiv
Show abstract

A substantial proportion of cancer patients fail to benefit from their prescribed combination regimens, yet identifying superior alternatives from the vast pharmacological space prior to treatment failure remains an unsolved clinical challenge. Existing computational approaches either rely on multi-omics profiles unavailable in standard oncological practice or reduce drug efficacy to scalar metrics that discard the dose-dependent resolution essential for therapeutic optimization. Here, we present XACT, a hierarchical deep learning framework that reconstructs full dose-dependent drug responses for both monotherapy and drug combinations using only clinically accessible transcriptomic profiles. By leveraging an asymmetric X-Linear Attention mechanism that models second-order interactions between molecular drug substructures and intracellular signaling pathway activities, XACT captures concentration-dependent pharmacodynamics with state-of-the-art accuracy and generalizability to unseen transcriptomic landscapes. When applied to the TCGA pan-cancer cohort, XACT-derived resistance scores were significantly associated with clinical treatment outcomes and stratified overall survival as the strongest independent prognostic factor after multivariate adjustment for tumor stage and cancer type. Systematic virtual screening revealed therapeutic vulnerabilities and nominated alternative regimens for treatment-refractory sarcoma and pancreatic adenocarcinoma. These results establish XACT as a scalable, interpretable, and clinically translatable framework that advances precision oncology from computational prediction toward data-driven therapeutic prescription.

Matching journals

The top 8 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

1
Cancer Research
116 papers in training set
Top 0.1%
12.3%
2
Nature Communications
4913 papers in training set
Top 19%
10.0%
3
Nature Cancer
35 papers in training set
Top 0.1%
9.0%
4
Genome Medicine
154 papers in training set
Top 1%
6.2%
5
Advanced Science
249 papers in training set
Top 4%
4.8%
6
Cell Reports Medicine
140 papers in training set
Top 1%
3.5%
7
Nature Medicine
117 papers in training set
Top 1%
3.0%
8
Cancer Discovery
61 papers in training set
Top 0.7%
3.0%
50% of probability mass above
9
Clinical Cancer Research
58 papers in training set
Top 0.7%
2.3%
10
Cancer Cell
38 papers in training set
Top 0.8%
2.0%
11
npj Precision Oncology
48 papers in training set
Top 0.4%
1.9%
12
PLOS Computational Biology
1633 papers in training set
Top 15%
1.9%
13
Cell Reports
1338 papers in training set
Top 22%
1.9%
14
Nature Biomedical Engineering
42 papers in training set
Top 0.7%
1.8%
15
Cell Systems
167 papers in training set
Top 7%
1.7%
16
Science Advances
1098 papers in training set
Top 19%
1.6%
17
npj Digital Medicine
97 papers in training set
Top 2%
1.6%
18
Nature Machine Intelligence
61 papers in training set
Top 2%
1.5%
19
Molecular Cancer
14 papers in training set
Top 0.5%
1.3%
20
Nature Cell Biology
99 papers in training set
Top 3%
1.3%
21
PLOS ONE
4510 papers in training set
Top 59%
1.3%
22
Communications Biology
886 papers in training set
Top 13%
1.3%
23
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
2130 papers in training set
Top 37%
1.3%
24
EMBO Molecular Medicine
85 papers in training set
Top 3%
1.2%
25
Science Translational Medicine
111 papers in training set
Top 5%
0.9%
26
Nucleic Acids Research
1128 papers in training set
Top 17%
0.8%
27
Scientific Reports
3102 papers in training set
Top 73%
0.8%
28
Briefings in Bioinformatics
326 papers in training set
Top 7%
0.7%
29
The Innovation
12 papers in training set
Top 1%
0.7%
30
eLife
5422 papers in training set
Top 58%
0.7%