PanoraOnc: A pan-cancer clinico-genomic AI model for transferable outcome predictions
Journal:
medRxiv
Published Date:
Aug 18, 2026
Abstract
Progress in precision oncology, including biomarker discovery and individualized treatment selection, is limited by the complexity of clinico-genomic data and the scarcity of large multimodal patient cohorts. Here, we introduce PanoraOnc, a pan-cancer artificial intelligence (AI) model pretrained on real-world clinical, genomic, and imaging data from 84,131 patients spanning 66 cancer types. PanoraOnc enables transferable treatment outcome prediction through pan-cancer pretraining and generalizes to unseen cohorts across cancer types, institutions, and therapeutic settings. Evaluation and fine-tuning were performed on cohorts comprising diverse modalities, including clinical features, targeted gene panels, immunofluorescence imaging, whole-exome sequencing, and transcriptomic profiles. Across these settings, PanoraOnc consistently outperforms statistical, machine-learning, survival, and AI baselines, with the largest improvements observed in zero- and few-shot scenarios, demonstrating that large-scale clinico-genomic pretraining enables robust and generalizable outcome predictions across previously unseen conditions. In addition, PanoraOnc supports biomarker discovery through explainable AI, revealing both established and underappreciated features, including tumor-infiltrating clonal hematopoiesis, oncogenic signaling pathways, and DNA damage response mechanisms in immunotherapy-treated melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer. Furthermore, PanoraOnc enables the identification of patient subgroups potentially benefitting from alternative treatments by estimating personalized treatment outcomes across therapeutic scenarios. These findings establish pan-cancer multimodal pretraining as a scalable paradigm for AI-assisted discovery in precision oncology.
