Janessa Laskin from the BC Cancer Centre and The University of British Columbia in Canada spoke at London Calling 2024 on the “Application and use of long-read sequencing in personalized cancer medicine.” Laskin explained that medical oncologists are motivated to find effective treatments for cancer and identify vulnerabilities. The Personalized OncoGenomics (POG) started in 2012 with patients in British Columbia, Canada, with advanced incurable or high-risk cancers. Patients are biopsied, and their tumors are sequenced. Clinical action is taken based on findings and hereditary information, for example. Larkin said that the whole genomes and transcriptomes from 960 adult cases and 223 pediatric cases provided clinically actionable findings in 83% of cases. WGTA-informed therapies were administered in 40% of cases. Long-read sequencing of 189 patient tumors and 41 matched normal samples led by O’Neill et al. identified differential methylation. They found clustering by tumor types. Methylation based on where the sample was taken from does not cluster well. Homologous recombination deficiency (HRD) can be measured by patterns in changes with platinum agents or PARP inhibitors. They identified hypermethylation in tumors silencing BRACA1 in patient samples, for example. Moving forward, POG patients can be selected for long-read sequencing. I am becoming more aware of the role of methylation and curious about how this impacts bacterial processes.
