Abstract

Early Cancer Detection in Plasma by Methylation Haplotyping

Kun Zhang, Associate Professor, University of California San Diego

Adjacent CpG sites in mammalian genomes tend to be co-methylated due to the processivity of enzymes responsible for adding or removing the methyl group. This pattern, called methylation haplotypes, can be utilized to detect low levels of circulating DNA from tumor or tumor-residing tissues in the blood. We have developed NGS-based targeted methylation sequencing assays for early detection and location of multiple cancer types in the plasma. In this talk I’ll discuss the underlying principles and present the results on over 3000 samples from multiple cohorts.