• Haikun Zhang, Peiling Dong, Shicheng Guo, Chengcheng Tao, Wei Chen, Wenmin Zhao, Jiakang Wang, Ramsey Cheung, Augusto Villanueva, Jian Fan, Huiguo Ding, Steven J Schrodi, Dake Zhang, and Changqing Zeng.
• Key Laboratory of Genomic and Precision Medicine, Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China.
• Bmc Med. 2020 Aug 3; 18 (1): 200.

BackgroundCirculating cell-free DNA (cfDNA) methylation has been demonstrated to be a promising approach for non-invasive cancer diagnosis. However, the high cost of whole genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS) hinders the clinical implementation of a methylation-based cfDNA early detection biomarker. We proposed a novel strategy in low-pass WGBS (~ 5 million reads) to detect methylation changes in circulating cell-free DNA (cfDNA) from patients with liver diseases and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).MethodsThe effective small sequencing depth were determined by 5 pilot cfDNA samples with relative high-depth WGBS. CfDNA of 51 patients with hepatitis, cirrhosis, and HCC were conducted using low-pass WGBS. The strategy was validated in an independent WGBS cohort of 32 healthy individuals and 26 early-stage HCC patients. Fifteen paired tumor tissue and buffy coat samples were used to characterize the methylation of hepatitis B virus (HBV) integration regions and genome distribution of cfDNA.ResultsA significant enrichment of cfDNA in intergenic and repeat regions, especially in previously reported HBV integration sites were observed, as a feature of cfDNA and the bias of cfDNA release. Methylation profiles nearby HBV integration sites were a better indicator for hypomethylation of tumor genome comparing to Alu and LINE (long interspersed nuclear element) repeats, and were able to facilitate the cfDNA-based HCC prediction. Hypomethylation nearby HBV integration sites (5 kb flanking) was detected in HCC patients, but not in patients with hepatitis and cirrhosis (MethylHBV5k, median:0.61 vs 0.72, P = 0.0003). Methylation levels of integration sites certain candidate regions exhibited an area under the receiver operation curve (AUC) value > 0.85 to discriminate HCC from non-HCC samples. The validation cohort achieved the prediction performance with an AUC of 0.954.ConclusionsHypomethylation around viral integration sites aids low-pass cfDNA WGBS to serve as a non-invasive approach for early HCC detection, and inspire future efforts on tumor surveillance for oncovirus with integration activity.

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