Methylation Anti-Profiling a Novel Approach to Diagnosing Cancer

Novelty:
The disclosed technology is a novel approach to diagnosing cancer, by looking for loss of methylation stability in gene expression instead of searching for specific methylation profiles.
Value Proposition:
The conventional approach to identifying epigenetic cancer markers is by querying the methylation profiles at specific sites within the DNA. This technology highlights a fundamentally novel approach to diagnosing cancer by providing evidence that cancer may not have a specific methylation profile. Instead it has an “anti-profile”, a stochastic deviation from normal. Other advantages include:

• Discovery of a new mechanism for cancer, “gene expression heterogeneity”, that allows cells to grow despite varying challenges (chemotherapy, hypoxia, metastasis).
• Uses standard techniques to detect cancer from as few as 10-25 CpG sites.
• Methods to identify hypomethylated blocks associated with cancer and “methylation boundary shifts” at CpG islands that result in hypermethylation of the CpG islands and shores.
• A safer alternative to current drug hypomethylation strategies, as hypomethylation is likely to cause or accelerate tumor development.
Technical Details:
The Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered a fundamentally novel approach to identifying cancer using gene expression heterogeneity. Because tumor heterogeneity is the leading barrier to effective cancer diagnosis and treatment; this technology consists of fundamentally novel methods for diagnosing cancer. Researchers used whole-genome bisulfite sequencing to study the DNA methylation differences between cancer types and normal cells. The combined findings have resulted in the discovery of a new mechanism for cancer, namely gene expression heterogeneity, that allows cells to grow despite varying challenges (chemotherapy, hypoxia, metastasis), and the genes that carry these properties; and provide the basis for a potentially disruptive technology associated with the diagnosis of cancer including novel methods for the diagnosing, detecting, prognosticating, and stratifying tumors will be associated with methylation anti-profiling, rather than methylation profiling for cancer.
Looking for Partners:
To develop and commercialize this technology for novel approaches to detecting, diagnosing, prognosing, and stratification of cancers
 

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