BioCentury
ARTICLE | Discovery & Translation

Two applications of omics-based biomarkers in cancer; plus Evox, Akoya and more

BioCentury’s roundup of translational news

December 1, 2021 1:24 AM UTC

Two Chinese academic groups demonstrated in Nature Communications that omics-derived biomarkers could help predict the risk of metastasis from primary tumor samples and diagnose sporadic young-onset colorectal cancer from fecal samples. In one study, a team led by  Hong Kong University of Science and Technology assistant professor Jiguang Wang developed a pan-cancer computational framework to predict metastatic risk and destination organs. Dubbed MetaNet, the framework integrates clinical and sequencing data from 32,176 primary and metastatic samples and stratifies metastatic risk based on genomic features in primary tumors. The group said a MetaNet-developed model achieved “better prognostic value than the standard histological grading system” in prostate cancer.

Separately, scientists at Fudan University led by Yanlei Ma established a microbial classifier based on 60 genus-level markers that could help detect sporadic young-onset colorectal cancer. The markers were identified through 16S rRNA gene sequencing of a training set of 509 fecal samples from patients and age-matched controls, followed by metagenomic sequencing of 200 samples. In testing and validation cohorts, the classifier’s probability of disease (POD) index achieved area under the curve (AUC) values of 0.80-0.88...