Helio Genomics announced that results from a new research study have been published in the peer-reviewed journal, Genome Medicine.
The study is entitled "Multimodal Epigenetic Sequencing Analysis (MESA) of Cell-free DNA for Non-invasive Colorectal Cancer Detection." This study was conducted as a collaboration between Helio Genomics, its sister company and the Division of Computational Biomedicine at the University of California, Irvine.
Applied to 690 cell-free DNA (cfDNA) samples from three colorectal cancer clinical cohorts, the novel MESA approach improved cancer detection when compared to traditional approaches that use epigenetic markers of promoter DNA methylation.
Key results of the study included:
· The MESA approach successfully captured both cfDNA methylation features and nucleosome organization information within a single assay.
· cfDNA methylation data captured in the MESA approach enabled detection of colorectal cancer.
· Nucleosome organization information (Nucleosome occupancy and fuzziness) captured by the MESA approach also enabled detection of colorectal cancer.
· Integrating multimodal epigenetic features (cfDNA methylation, nucleosome occupancy,
nucleosome fuzziness, and a window protection score as a measure of nucleosome positioning) by using MESA enhanced cancer detection when compared to any single modality alone.
· MESA was shown to be effective in multiple cohorts of patients, demonstrating the robustness of this multimodal approach.
