Topological integration of RPPA proteomic data with multi-omics data for survival prediction in breast cancer via pathway activity inference

BACKGROUND: The analysis of integrated multi-omics data enables the identification of disease-related biomarkers that cannot be identified from a single omics profile. Although protein-level data reflects the cellular status of cancer tissue more directly than gene-level data, past studies have mainly focused on multi-omics integration using gene-level data as opposed to protein-level data. However, the use of protein-level data (such as mass spectrometry) in multi-omics integration has some limitations. For example, the correlation between the characteristics of gene-level data (such as mRNA) and protein-level data is weak, and it is difficult to detect low-abundance signaling proteins that are used to target cancer. The reverse phase protein array (RPPA) is a highly sensitive antibody-based quantification method for signaling proteins. However, the number of protein features in RPPA data is extremely low compared to the number of gene features in gene-level data. In this study, we present a new method for integrating RPPA profiles with RNA-Seq and DNA methylation profiles for survival prediction based on the integrative directed random walk (iDRW) framework proposed in our previous study. In the iDRW framework, each omics profile is merged into a single pathway profile that reflects the topological information of the pathway. In order to address the sparsity of RPPA profiles, we employ the random walk with restart (RWR) approach on the pathway network. RESULTS: Our model was validated using survival prediction analysis for a breast cancer dataset from The Cancer Genome Atlas. Our proposed model exhibited improved performance compared with other methods that utilize pathway information and also out-performed models that did not include the RPPA data utilized in our study. The risk pathways identified for breast cancer in this study were closely related to well-known breast cancer risk pathways. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicated that RPPA data is useful for survival prediction for breast cancer patients under our framework. We also observed that iDRW effectively integrates RNA-Seq, DNA methylation, and RPPA profiles, while variation in the composition of the omics data can affect both prediction performance and risk pathway identification. These results suggest that omics data composition is a critical parameter for iDRW. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12920-019-0511-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.