PathTIGR: A pathway topology-informed graph representation learning framework for immunotherapy response prediction

Immunotherapy has revolutionized cancer treatment, yet substantial inter-patient response heterogeneity limits therapeutic benefit to specific patient subsets. Here, we present PathTIGR, a pathway topology-informed graph representation learning framework that systematically integrates biological pathway network topology knowledge with genome variation information for immunotherapy response prediction. PathTIGR uses a three-component design: (i) pathway graph encoder with multihead attention embeding pathway topology knowledge and cancer genomic variants to pathway representation, (ii) transformer module capturing pathway regulatory dependencies, and (iii) multilayer perceptron synthesizing pathway-level representations to predict immunotherapy response. This architecture enables PathTIGR to capture complex molecular interactions underlying immunotherapy response. Comprehensive validation across multiple independent immunotherapy cohorts demonstrates that PathTIGR achieves superior predictive performance compared to established biomarkers and state-of-the-art deep learning approaches while maintaining biological interpretability through identification of key signatures underlying response heterogeneity. PathTIGR represents an interpretable graph-based learning framework that enhances immunotherapy response prediction and elucidates molecular determinants of therapeutic efficacy, thereby facilitating the advancement of precision cancer immunotherapy.