Joint modeling of longitudinal and time‐to‐event data for dynamic disease risk prediction using proteomics;




Lindén, Markus; Ammunét, Tea; Välikangas, Tommi; Elo, Laura L.; Suomi, Tomi

PublisherWiley

2026

 Protein Science

e70621

35

6

0961-8368

1469-896X

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1002/pro.70621

https://doi.org/10.1002/pro.70621

https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/526456075



Biomedical studies increasingly incorporate longitudinal data, enabling us to track individual disease processes over time at the molecular level, and to discover associations of the molecular profiles with the outcome of interest, such as the onset of a disease. Despite the potential of statistical methods that jointly model longitudinal and time-to-event data, they have not yet been widely adopted in high-throughput omics studies. Therefore, we evaluated multiple approaches for joint modeling of longitudinal and time-to-event data, and we introduce a joint modeling strategy for longitudinal proteomics studies. The focus is on assessing the utility of the methods in predicting the dynamic disease risk of an individual from longitudinal proteome profiles. To benchmark the methods, we used a range of simulated datasets that reflected real proteome profiles with varying complexities. Our results clearly demonstrated the advantages of the longitudinal methods over conventional Cox proportional hazards models with single time point studies. This was further supported by re-analysis of data from a proteomics study of early type 1 diabetes prediction, where we discovered new early candidate proteins associated with the disease onset that were not detected in the original study.




Joint modelrisk predictionsurvival analysis


LE reports grants from the European Research Council ERC (677943), European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (955321), Academy of Finland (310561, 314443, 329278, 335434, 335611, and 341342), and Sigrid Juselius Foundation during the conduct of the study. ML has been supported by the Vilho, Yrjo and Kalle Vaisala Foundation. Our research is also supported by Biocenter Finland, and ELIXIR Finland.


Last updated on 09/06/2026 07:58:12 AM