Fluctuating DNA methylation tracks cancer evolution at clinical scale.

ABSTRACT: Cancer development and response to treatment are evolutionary processes^1,2, but characterizing evolutionary dynamics at a clinically meaningful scale has remained challenging³. Here we develop a new methodology called EVOFLUx, based on natural DNA methylation barcodes fluctuating over time⁴, that quantitatively infers evolutionary dynamics using only a bulk tumour methylation profile as input. We apply EVOFLUx to 1,976 well-characterized lymphoid cancer samples spanning a broad spectrum of diseases and show that initial tumour growth rate, malignancy age and epimutation rates vary by orders of magnitude across disease types. We measure that subclonal selection occurs only infrequently within bulk samples and detect occasional examples of multiple independen

SUBMITTER: Gabbutt C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12443617 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature