Predicting neoadjuvant breast cancer therapy response using BRIDGE from tumor transcriptomics and histopathology

ABSTRACTBackground While expression-based signatures inform adjuvant therapy in breast cancer (BC), no approved molecular biomarkers exist for the neoadjuvant setting, where early response prediction could inform treatment decisions. This challenge is compounded by intratumoral heterogeneity, as multiple malignant subtypes may coexist within a tumor and influence therapy sensitivity. Methods We developed BRIDGE, a computational framework that deconvolves the pre-treatment bulk tumor transcriptome to estimate molecular subtype composition and predict pathological complete response (pCR) to neoadjuvant therapy. BRIDGE was trained on 10 transcriptomics datasets and tested on 24 independent ones spanning different sub-types. Six additional datasets with pre-treatment H in HER2+ disease, an AUC of 0.77 (OR = 8.3); and in TNBC, an AUC of 0.73 (OR = 3.1). We further developed BRIDGE-Slide, which applies BRIDGE to pre-treatment histopathology slides via deep learning–inferred transcriptomics. BRIDGE-Slide outperforms direct slide-to-response models, underscoring its potential as a first-of-its-kind, fast, low-cost biomarker. Exploratory leave-one-dataset-out analyses across datasets treated with alternative neoadjuvant regimens suggest generalizability to ICB-treated ER+/HER2− tumors, pending validation in larger cohorts. Finally, spatial transcriptomics shows that BRIDGE-derived subtype assignments form spatially cohesive regions aligned with canonical molecular features, reinforcing its biological interpretability. Conclusions BRIDGE is a biologically grounded framework for neoadjuvant BC response prediction, validated on a rich set of different patients' cohorts. Its histopathology-based version opens the door for fast and low-cost prediction in the neoadjuvant setting, upon further prospective testing and validation.