Predicting survival in prospective clinical trials using weakly-supervised QSP

Quantitative systems pharmacology (QSP) models of cancer immunity provide mechanistic insights into cellular dynamics and drug effects that are difficult to study clinically. However, their inability to predict patient survival mechanistically limits their utility in anti-cancer drug development. To overcome this, we link virtual patients from a QSP model to real clinical trial patients. Using data from atezolizumab trials in non-small cell lung cancer, we show that tumor-based linkage effectively captures survival outcomes. By treating linked survival and censoring as weak supervision labels, we trained survival models using only QSP model covariates, without clinical covariates. Our approach also predicts survival for treatments not included in training data. Specifically, we accurately estimated survival hazard ratios (HR) for chemotherapy monotherapy and atezolizumab plus chemotherapy combination. The predicted HR of 0.70 (95% prediction interval [PI] 0.55–0.86) closely matches the observed HR of 0.79 (95% PI 0.64–0.98) from the IMpower130 trial.