<p>Aberrant DNA methylation plays a critical role in tumorigenesis. While DNA methylation has been used for cancer detection and classification, DNA hemi-methylation, a novel epigenetic mark has not been analyzed extensively in cancer epigenomes. Here we report a strand-specific (ss) sequencing method (MeDIP-Seq) for plasma cell free (cf) DNA (sscf-MeDIP-Seq), which can analyze both symmetrically methylated DNA regions (DMRs) as well as hemi-methylated regions (DHMRs). Using the sscf-MeDIP-Seq method, we analyzed plasma cfDNA methylomes of 271 samples from subjects with liver cancer and brain cancer and from individuals without cancer (controls). Among them, 215 samples were chosen as the discovery cohort for the identification of DMRs and DHMRs specific in each subject group and for the training of machine learning models of multi-cancer detection (MCD) using DMRs, DHMRs and DMRs+DHMRs as inputs. These models were then used to predict the 56 samples in the validation cohort. We found that models trained with DMRs+DHMRs as inputs in general outperformed models trained with DMRs or DHMRs alone, with AUROC being 0.971, 0.981, and 0.99 in predicting control, liver and brain cancer samples in the validation cohort, respectively, by the DMR+DHMR-trained models. </p>

Tumor detection by analysis of both symmetric- and hemi-methylation of plasma cell-free DNA