A Computational Model of Cancer Metabolism for Personalised Medicine

Cancer cells must rewrite their ‘‘internal code’’ to satisfy the demand for growth and proliferation. Such changes are driven by a combination of genetic (e.g., genes’ mutations) and non-genetic factors (e.g., tumour microenvironment) that result in an alteration of cellular metabolism. For this reason, understanding the metabolic and genomic changes of a cancer cell can provide useful insight on cancer progression and survival outcomes. In our work, we present a computational framework that uses patient-specific data to investigate cancer metabolism and provide personalised survival predictions and cancer development outcomes. The proposed model integrates patient-specific multi-omics data (i.e., genomic, metabolomic and clinical data) into a metabolic model of cancer to produce a list of metabolic reactions affecting cancer progression. Quantitative and predictive analysis, through survival analysis and machine learning techniques, is then performed on the list of selected reactions. Since our model performs an analysis of patient-specific data, the outcome of our pipeline provides a personalised prediction of survival outcome and cancer development based on a subset of identified multi-omics features (genomic, metabolomic and clinical data). In particular, our work aims to develop a computational pipeline for clinicians that relates the omic profile of each patient to their survival probability, based on a combination of machine learning and metabolic modelling techniques. The model provides patient-specific predictions on cancer development and survival outcomes towards the development of personalised medicine.