Tonight we started our first P2 run with two PromethION flow cells. I also continued watching the London Calling 2023 Showcase Stage on liquid biopsy. I watched them out of order! Today I watched Billy Lau from Stanford University School of Medicine do a quick presentation titled “Nanopore sequencing of cell-free DNA for methylation-based breast cancer detection in a case-control research cohort.” Lau spoked about the use of liquid biopsies for both longitudinal monitoring of cancer and detection in a non-invasive measurement. Lau’s group is using sequencing to detect patterns of methylation (5mC) in tumors. High-throughput nanopore sequencing of cell-free DNA methods were developed by Lau’s team in order to sequence case control cohorts using under a ml of plasma. To implement the multi-omic cfDNA they trained classifiers to detect hypo and hypermethylation. They also developed fragmentation models based on fragmentation patterns, mixture models, and random forest analysis. Lau’s group has developed a model for diagnostics that will be further improved to increase detection power. Their high-throughput method is intruiguing, and I want to learn more about it!
