A Multimodal Foundation Model for Longitudinal Patient Representation and Scalable Insight Generation in Oncology
Organizations: Tempus AI, Inc., Chicago, IL, USA
Abstract
Precision oncology necessitates a longitudinal model of patient state that captures cancer evolution and treatment over time, integrating multimodal observations. We introduce the oFM, a foundation model developed on a real-world oncology cohort of 1.67 million cancer patients that integrates clinical trajectories with DNA, RNA, and H&E pathology. Patient-level partitions were reserved for training, validation, and testing, with over one million patients used for training. The oFM encodes daily clinical and molecular episodes and, along with pathology images, integrates them over time to produce a patient state embedding. We evaluate frozen oFM embeddings against expert-curated clinical and molecular baseline features. In prognostic benchmarks, the oFM improved AUC for treatment response, progression-free survival, and overall survival (0.774 vs. 0.563 for overall survival). Across 11 comparative-treatment cohorts, the oFM embeddings achieved a three-fold higher pooled and scale-normalized treatment-benefit AUTOC than baseline features with improved benefit ranking in 9 of 11 cohorts, and provided stronger prognostic discrimination within both treatment arms. We also evaluated a mechanism discovery framework that interprets downstream models built on oFM embeddings by linking their predicted outcomes to clinically and biologically grounded mechanisms through an evidence-grounded temporal graph, enabling evaluation in clinical and drug-development applications.
Figures & tables
| # | Reference |
| 1 | CIViC evidence EID993: KRAS Exon 2 Mutation in Colorectal Cancer (Predictive, level A). |
| 2 | CIViC evidence EID2998: KRAS Mutation in Lung Non-small Cell Carcinoma (Predictive, level A). |
| 3 | CIViC evidence EID5345: KRAS Mutation in Colorectal Cancer (Predictive, level A). |
| 4 | CIViC evidence EID704: CD274 Expression in Melanoma (Predictive, level B). |
| 5 | CIViC evidence EID1167: CD274 Expression in Lung Non-small Cell Carcinoma (Predictive, level B). |
| 6 | CIViC evidence EID7313: PIK3CA Mutation in Breast Cancer (Predictive, level A). |
Appendix figures & tables4 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Tumor type | Therapy group | OS (pos) | PFS (pos) | Response (pos) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Colorectal cancer | Biologic + chemotherapy | 383 (285) | 355 (280) | 451 (196) |
| NSCLC | Chemotherapy + IO/ICI | 325 (207) | 327 (214) | 450 (181) |
| Breast cancer | Hormone + targeted (SM) | 239 (203) | 279 (214) | 277 (94) |
| Colorectal cancer | Chemotherapy | 282 (226) | 248 (199) | 240 (100) |
| Pancreatic cancer | Chemotherapy | 274 (148) | 205 (122) | 281 (62) |
| Prostate cancer | Hormone | 299 (290) | 326 (287) | 100 (44) |
| Cohort | Selected features |
| Breast HR+/HER2 CDK4/6 and aromatase inhibitor (AI) comb. vs. AI alone, 1L | 104 |
| CRC RAS WT anti-EGFR vs. anti-VEGF, 1L | 197 |
| NSCLC pembro–chemo combo vs. chemo, 1L | 94 |
| NSCLC pembro–chemo combo vs. pembro alone, 1L | 90 |
| NSCLC dual IO vs. IO–chemo combo, 1L | 81 |
| mRCC dual IO vs. IO–TKI, 1L | 160 |
| Cohort | Experimental / Control arm | Clinical question | Train+val (exp / ctrl) | Test (exp / ctrl) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Breast HR+/HER2- CDK4/6 and Aromatase inhibitors (AI) comb vs AI alone 1L | Exp: CDK4/6 inhibitor plus aromatase inhibitor (AI) Ctrl: aromatase inhibitor alone | Does adding a CDK4/6 inhibitor (ribociclib, palbociclib, or abemaciclib) to first-line aromatase inhibitor therapy improve progression-free and overall survival in HR+/HER2- metastatic breast cancer? | 814 / 146 | 291 / 63 |
| CRC RAS WT anti-EGFR vs anti-VEGF 1L | Exp: anti-EGFR antibody (cetuximab or panitumumab) combined with FOLFOX or FOLFIRI chemotherapy Ctrl: bevacizumab combined with FOLFOX | In RAS wild-type metastatic colorectal cancer, does first-line anti-EGFR antibody plus chemotherapy improve overall survival versus bevacizumab plus chemotherapy? | 204 / 427 | 72 / 144 |
| NSCLC Pembro Chemo combo vs Chemo 1L | Exp: pembrolizumab plus platinum (carboplatin or cisplatin) plus pemetrexed Ctrl: platinum plus pemetrexed (chemotherapy only) | In driver-negative metastatic NSCLC, does adding pembrolizumab to platinum plus pemetrexed improve overall survival versus chemotherapy alone, and across PD-L1 subgroups ( 1%, 1–49%, 50%), which patients derive the greatest incremental benefit? | 1034 / 113 | 323 / 30 |
| NSCLC Pembro Chemo combo vs Pembro alone 1L | Exp: pembrolizumab plus platinum-based chemotherapy Ctrl: pembrolizumab monotherapy | In PD-L1 50% driver-negative metastatic NSCLC, does adding chemotherapy to first-line pembrolizumab improve outcomes versus pembrolizumab monotherapy? | 259 / 311 | 87 / 101 |
| NSCLC dual IO vs IO Chemo combo 1L | Exp: chemo-immunotherapy with pembrolizumab plus platinum plus pemetrexed or paclitaxel (KEYNOTE-189 style) Ctrl: dual checkpoint immunotherapy with ipilimumab plus nivolumab, with or without chemotherapy (CheckMate-227 style) | In driver-negative metastatic NSCLC, does first-line chemo-immunotherapy (pembrolizumab-based) outperform dual checkpoint blockade (ipilimumab plus nivolumab)? | 1231 / 111 | 398 / 54 |
| mRCC dual IO vs IO-TKI 1L | Exp: IO-TKI combinations (pembrolizumab plus axitinib, lenvatinib plus pembrolizumab, cabozantinib plus nivolumab, or avelumab plus axitinib) Ctrl: dual checkpoint immunotherapy (ipilimumab plus nivolumab) | In metastatic renal cell carcinoma, does first-line IO-TKI combination therapy improve outcomes versus dual checkpoint immunotherapy (ipilimumab plus nivolumab)? | 269 / 191 | 81 / 74 |
| Component | Parameters |
| Trained parameters: oFM | |
| Episode encoder (GatorTron-base-2k + FoNE) | 358M |
| transformer layers | 303M |
| token-embedding matrix ( ) | 51.3M |
| position/type embeddings + LayerNorm | 2.1M |
| FoNE numeric embedder | 1.1M |
Multimodal Foundation Models
Multimodal foundation models learn shared capabilities across text, images, audio, video, and other signals for understanding, generation, and action.
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