GenVarFormer: Predicting gene expression from long-range mutations in cancer

Abstract

Distinguishing the rare "driver" mutations that fuel cancer progression from the vast background of "passenger" mutations in the non-coding genome is a fundamental challenge in cancer biology. A primary mechanism that non-coding driver mutations contribute to cancer is by affecting gene expression, potentially from millions of nucleotides away. However, existing predictors of gene expression from mutations are unable to simultaneously handle interactions spanning millions of base pairs, the extreme sparsity of somatic mutations, and generalize to unseen genes. To overcome these limitations, we introduce GenVarFormer (GVF), a novel transformer-based architecture designed to learn mutation representations and their impact on gene expression. GVF efficiently predicts the effect of mutations up to 8 million base pairs away from a gene by only considering mutations and their local DNA context, while omitting the vast intermediate sequence. Using data from 864 breast cancer samples from The Cancer Genome Atlas, we demonstrate that GVF predicts gene expression with 26-fold higher correlation across samples than current models. In addition, GVF is the first model of its kind to generalize to unseen genes and samples simultaneously. Finally, we find that GVF patient embeddings are more informative than ground-truth gene expression for predicting overall patient survival in the most prevalent breast cancer subtype, luminal A. GVF embeddings and gene expression yielded concordance indices of $0.706^{\pm0.136}$ and $0.573^{\pm0.234}$, respectively. Our work establishes a new state-of-the-art for modeling the functional impact of non-coding mutations in cancer and provides a powerful new tool for identifying potential driver events and prognostic biomarkers.