Precision Oncology Through Dialogue: AI-HOPE-RTK-RAS Integrates Clinical and Genomic Insights into RTK-RAS

Ei-Wen Yang1, Brigette Waldrup2, Enrique Velazquez-Villarreal2,3

  • 1PolyAgent, San Francisco, CA 94102, USA.

Biomedicines
|August 28, 2025
PubMed

Insights

A new AI system, AI-HOPE-RTK-RAS, enables natural language analysis of colorectal cancer (CRC) signaling pathways. It reveals novel associations between RTK-RAS alterations, early-onset CRC, and patient ancestry, aiding precision oncology.

Area of Science:

  • Oncology
  • Bioinformatics
  • Artificial Intelligence

Background:

  • The RTK-RAS pathway is crucial in colorectal cancer (CRC) pathogenesis, influencing proliferation, survival, and treatment resistance.
  • Genomic alterations in KRAS, NRAS, BRAF, and EGFR are key in CRC precision oncology.
  • Integrating genomic data with clinical/demographic information is challenging due to fragmented resources.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To develop AI-HOPE-RTK-RAS, a specialized conversational AI for natural language-based, integrative analysis of RTK-RAS pathway alterations in CRC.
  • To enable real-time exploration of RTK-RAS biology in CRC cohorts, facilitating biomarker discovery and therapeutic stratification.

Main Methods:

  • AI-HOPE-RTK-RAS utilizes a modular architecture with large language models (LLMs) and a natural language-to-code engine.
  • It operates on harmonized multi-dimensional datasets from cBioPortal, supporting mutation frequency profiling, odds ratio testing, and survival modeling.
  • Validation involved reproducing known trends and exploring co-alterations, therapy response, and ancestry-specific mutation patterns.

Main Results:

  • AI-HOPE-RTK-RAS rapidly interrogated CRC datasets, confirming known patterns and identifying novel associations.
  • Early-onset CRC (EOCRC) patients showed significantly lower RTK-RAS alterations (67.97%) compared to late-onset (79.9%).
  • Specific findings include improved survival in early-stage KRAS-mutant patients treated with Bevacizumab, poorer prognosis for BRAF-mutant/MSS tumors, and ancestry-enriched mutations like NF1 linked to better outcomes.

Conclusions:

  • AI-HOPE-RTK-RAS represents a new class of conversational AI for precision oncology, enabling complex, integrative analyses.
  • The system uncovers canonical and ancestry-specific RTK-RAS patterns, particularly in EOCRC and underrepresented populations, advancing equitable cancer care.
  • This demonstrates the potential of domain-optimized AI tools to accelerate biomarker discovery, refine therapeutic strategies, and democratize multi-omic data access.

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