A network model for patient-derived drug response in breast cancer integrating multi-omics datasets

The widespread availability of multi-omics tumor profiling has enabled detailed molecular characterization of individual tumors, paving the way for more effective, less toxic, and patient-specific therapies. However, widespread compound screens in human patients are constrained by ethical and logistical challenges, underscoring the need for computational models capable of predicting in vivo drug response. Here, we introduce PDDRNet-MH, a multiplex heterogeneous network-based framework that integrates genomic, transcriptomic, and epigenomic tumor profiles with drug chemical structures, pharmacological activity, and side-effect data to infer personalized drug responses. PDDRNet-MH constructs an integrated network connecting patients, cell lines, drugs, and genes, with each component represented by four biologically and pharmacologically informed similarity layers. This design enables the systematic propagation of drug-biomarker associations across modalities. We applied PDDRNet-MH to breast cancer patient data from The Cancer Genome Atlas and benchmarked its predictive performance against state-of-the-art methods on eleven FDA-approved breast cancer drugs. PDDRNet-MH achieved consistently high accuracy, with perfect prediction scores for gemcitabine and vinorelbine (Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve [AUC-ROC] = 1.00; Area Under the Precision-Recall Curve [AUC-PR] = 1.00) and near-perfect scores for methotrexate and zoledronate (AUC-ROC = 0.95; AUC-PR = 0.99), demonstrating its ability to robustly distinguish sensitive from resistant patients. Biologically, PDDRNet-MH accurately prioritized established clinical biomarkers, including HER2 (ERBB2) for lapatinib and BRCA1/2 for doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide. Beyond known associations, the model identified additional genes within the HER2 amplicon on chromosome 17q12, including STARD3, MIEN1, and PPP1R1B, whose amplification was significantly associated with elevated drug response scores, suggesting potential roles in HER2-targeted therapy. These findings highlight the ability of PDDRNet-MH to recover and extend clinically relevant drug-biomarker associations, supporting its utility in guiding precision oncology.