| Talk title | Advances in Plasma DNA Analysis for Noninvasive Prenatal Testing and Cancer Liquid Biopsy |
| Speaker | Prof. Kun SUN Research Assistant Professor, Bioinformatician Department of Chemical Pathology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong |
| Date & Time | 27 May 2019 (Mon) 10:30-11:30 |
| Venue | Room G004, E12 Building (University of Macau) |
| Abstract | This talk introduces the basis and recent research advances of plasma cell-free DNA analysis based noninvasive prenatal testing and cancer liquid biopsy. We had developed a novel method for Down syndrome test, which test is the most routinely used worldwide, to overcome the drawbacks of the current approaches. We further showed that we were able to reconstruct the fetal genome as well as epigenome with high accuracy from the plasma DNA of pregnant women. We demonstrated that several hallmarks of the tumor such as copy number aberration and global hypomethylation could be detected in the plasma of cancer patients, which could be used to diagnose cancer. Integrated methylomic analysis allows us to trace the tissue origin of plasma DNA towards tumor origin prediction in cancer patients. Moreover, through statistical analysis of high sequencing depth plasma DNA data, we had further mined a variety of plasma DNA fragmentation characteristics which showed clinical utility in both noninvasive prenatal testing and cancer liquid biopsy. |