Abstract
Aberrant DNA methylation has long been implicated in cancers. In this work we present a highly discriminative DNA methylation biomarker for non-small cell lung cancers and fourteen other cancers. Based on 69 NSCLC cell lines and 257 cancer-free lung tissues we identified a CpG island in SCT gene promoter which was verified by qMSP experiment in 15 NSCLC cell lines and 3 immortalized human respiratory epithelium cells. In addition, we found that SCT promoter was methylated in 23 cancer cell lines involving >10 cancer types profiled by ENCODE. We found that SCT promoter is hyper-methylated in primary tumors from TCGA lung cancer cohort. Additionally, we found that SCT promoter is methylated at high frequencies in fifteen malignancies and is not methylated in ∼1000 non-cancerous tissues across >30 organ types. Our study indicates that SCT promoter methylation is a highly discriminative biomarker for lung and many other cancers.
Footnotes
Conflict of interest: Not declared
Partial funding was provided by the Texas Specialized Program of Research Excellence in Lung Cancer (P50CA70907) and the Early Detection Research Network (U01CA084971), National Cancer Institute and the Canary Foundation (Palo Alto, CA). MQZ was supported by National Institute of Health (HG001696), National Basic Research Program of China (2012CB316503) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (91019016, 31061160497).