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VARION: A Network Propagation Framework for Individual Patient Somatic Mutation Interpretation in Cancer Molecular Subtyping

Preprint Created on 12 Sep 2026 bioRxiv

Accurate molecular subtyping of individual cancer patients from somatic mutation data remains a challenge in precision oncology research. Existing network-based stratification (NBS) methods treat all mutations equivalently, require full-cohort batch processing, and do not demonstrate generalization to independent datasets without retraining. To address this, we present variant interpretation via the adaptive network pRopagatION (VARION), which integrates population-level variant constraint scoring with protein-protein interaction (PPI) network topology. The Adaptive Topology-aware Random Walk with Restart (ATR-RWR) algorithm weights each mutated gene by {varphi}g = {surd}(GIS(g) x {rho}topo(g)), where GIS (Gene Intolerance Score) reflects population-level functional constraint, propagated across a shared PPI network; subtype assignment then uses cosine similarity to TCGA-derived reference centroids, enabling real-time single-patient classification. Across ten TCGA cancer cohorts (n = 2,417), VARION achieved 77.7% accuracy for ovarian cancer (OV), 69.5% for glioblastoma (GBM), 90.2% for cholangiocarcinoma (CHOL), and 75.4% for gastric cancer (STAD). A controlled benchmark applying two alternative clustering methods (PyNBS; a dense autoencoder) to identical ATR-RWR propagation matrices recovered no significant driver enrichment (OR = 1.79 and 1.52, n.s.), versus OR = 144.29 (p = 1.77x10^-12) for VARION, confirming that the GIS-weighted centroid architecture, not propagation alone, drives performance; generalization without retraining was further confirmed in two independent cohorts (ICGC CCA, n = 396; PCAWG, n = 110; OR = {infty}, p < 5x10^-9). Together, these results indicate that VARION's GIS-weighted centroid architecture enables individual-patient molecular subtyping that outperforms existing NBS and graph-learning clustering approaches, with high sensitivity for clinically actionable rare subtypes and robust cross-platform generalization.

Kwon, T., Park, Y.-G., Choi, J.-G.

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