Multi-Omics Prognostic Marker Discovery and Survival Modeling: A Case Study on Pan-Cancer Survival Analyses in Women’s Cancers

Survival analysis plays a critical role in cancer research, offering insights into patient outcomes and informing personalized treatments. Advances in sequencing and profiling technologies have unlocked the potential of multi-omics data to improve prognostic models. However, the high dimensionality of multi-omics data often complicates analysis and limits clinical application. Additionally, most studies rely on the traditional Cox proportional hazards model, with limited exploration of alternative survival algorithms or feature selection methods. Few frameworks integrate optimal features across multiple omics modalities, leaving a gap in harnessing the full potential of multi-omics data. To address these challenges, we developed PRISM (PRognostic marker Identification and Survival Modelling through Multi-omics Integration), a comprehensive framework for improving survival predictions and identifying key prognostic markers. PRISM systematically evaluates feature selection methods and survival models, employing a voting-based pipeline to identify robust features from single-omics data. These features are integrated using feature-level fusion to determine the best modality combinations for survival prediction. Applied to The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) data for Breast Invasive Carcinoma (BRCA), Cervical Squamous Cell Carcinoma and Endocervical Adenocarcinoma (CESC), and Uterine Corpus Endometrial Carcinoma (UCEC), PRISM demonstrated that integrating DNA methylation, miRNA, and copy number variation data significantly outperforms single-omics approaches (BRCA: C-index 0.774; CESC: 0.835; UCEC: 0.766). Pan-cancer analysis further demonstrated the biological relevance of these multi-modal signatures, revealing shared oncogenic pathways and potential therapeutic targets. By reducing data dimensionality while preserving predictive power, PRISM offers a scalable and general-purpose solution for integrating multi-omics data, advancing cancer research and enabling precision medicine.