The utility of cancer whole genome and transcriptome sequencing (cWGTS) in oncology is increasingly recognized. However, implementation of cWGTS is challenged by the need to deliver results within ...clinically relevant timeframes, concerns about assay sensitivity, reporting and prioritization of findings. In a prospective research study we develop a workflow that reports comprehensive cWGTS results in 9 days. Comparison of cWGTS to diagnostic panel assays demonstrates the potential of cWGTS to capture all clinically reported mutations with comparable sensitivity in a single workflow. Benchmarking identifies a minimum of 80× as optimal depth for clinical WGS sequencing. Integration of germline, somatic DNA and RNA-seq data enable data-driven variant prioritization and reporting, with oncogenic findings reported in 54% more patients than standard of care. These results establish key technical considerations for the implementation of cWGTS as an integrated test in clinical oncology.
Men can play an important role in supporting gender equality. In the present research, we draw on Intergroup Contact Theory to examine positive intergroup contact with feminist women as one factor ...that can encourage men to support gender equality. In one cross-sectional study (
N
= 170) and one half-longitudinal panel study (
N
= 240), we found that straight men who reported more positive contact with feminist women also reported greater feminist solidarity. Cross-sectional results indicated that straight men’s solidarity with feminists, in turn, predicted more support for gender equality in public and domestic spheres and greater awareness of their gender privilege. The longitudinal results also supported the association between solidarity with feminists and gender privilege awareness, but not public and domestic support for gender equality. Decades of research has shown that positive intergroup contact can change attitudes. Our research suggests that, when it comes to gender equality, positive contact with feminist women may also encourage men to identify with feminists and raise their gender consciousness.
Multiple large-scale genomic profiling efforts have been undertaken in osteosarcoma to define the genomic drivers of tumorigenesis, therapeutic response, and disease recurrence. The spatial and ...temporal intratumor heterogeneity could also play a role in promoting tumor growth and treatment resistance. We conducted longitudinal whole-genome sequencing of 37 tumor samples from 8 patients with relapsed or refractory osteosarcoma. Each patient had at least one sample from a primary site and a metastatic or relapse site. Subclonal copy-number alterations were identified in all patients except one. In 5 patients, subclones from the primary tumor emerged and dominated at subsequent relapses. MYC gain/amplification was enriched in the treatment-resistant clones in 6 of 7 patients with multiple clones. Amplifications in other potential driver genes, such as CCNE1, RAD21, VEGFA, and IGF1R, were also observed in the resistant copy-number clones. A chromosomal duplication timing analysis revealed that complex genomic rearrangements typically occurred prior to diagnosis, supporting a macroevolutionary model of evolution, where a large number of genomic aberrations are acquired over a short period of time followed by clonal selection, as opposed to ongoing evolution. A mutational signature analysis of recurrent tumors revealed that homologous repair deficiency (HRD)-related SBS3 increases at each time point in patients with recurrent disease, suggesting that HRD continues to be an active mutagenic process after diagnosis. Overall, by examining the clonal relationships between temporally and spatially separated samples from patients with relapsed/refractory osteosarcoma, this study sheds light on the intratumor heterogeneity and potential drivers of treatment resistance in this disease.
The chemoresistant population in recurrent osteosarcoma is subclonal at diagnosis, emerges at the time of primary resection due to selective pressure from neoadjuvant chemotherapy, and is characterized by unique oncogenic amplifications.
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Background: Next generation sequencing (NGS) assays have accelerated the identification of mutations and potential matched targeted therapies for patients with cancer. However, a ...significant proportion of patients do not derive clinical benefit from targeted panel sequencing approaches. Cancer whole genome and transcriptome sequencing (cWGTS) offers the opportunity to fully characterize tumors, but are challenged by significant cost and computational resource requirements, concerns of assay sensitivity, and the need to deliver curated results within clinically relevant time frames. We performed a prospective study to evaluate the feasibility and utility of cWGTS in pediatric and young adults with solid tumors. Methods: We developed an automated analytical workflow (Isabl) for the QC and processing of cWGTS data to include ensembl variant calling for germline and somatic substitutions, indels, and structural variants; fusion genes; gene expression; and mutation signatures. Treatment biomarkers were annotated using OncoKB with generation of a clinical prototype report. We tested the feasibility of cWGTS implementation, evaluated its analytical validity compared to standard diagnostic assays, and characterized the clinical utility of incremental findings in a prospective study of children and young adults treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Results: A total of 114 patients were enrolled. Standard NGS assays (MSK-IMPACT, MSK-Fusion) identified clinically relevant biomarkers in 22% of cases. The cWGTS process was completed, from sample acquisition to summary report, in less than 12 days. Comparison against clinically reported NGS results demonstrated high precision and recall for reported mutations (98.8%) with high concordance across variant allele representations (r
2
> 0.73). cWGTS identified additional oncogenic mutations not captured by targeted sequencing in 49% of patients. Furthermore, incremental findings, beyond those identified by NGS assays, of direct clinical relevance (diagnostic, prognostic, therapy guiding) were identified in 26% of patients. Importantly, < 5% of the incremental findings would have been captured by whole exome or transcriptome sequencing alone. Of possible therapeutic relevance, cWGTS analyses revealed a significantly higher tumor mutation burden than previously reported (range: 0 - 11.23). Conclusions: We demonstrate feasibility, analytical validity and clinical utility of cWGTS approaches in pediatric and young adult cancer patients, with nearly half of all patients having incremental findings that were not captured by standard targeted NGS approaches.
Abstract
Whole genome sequencing (WGS) enables the identification of all cancer associated biomarkers in a patient’s tumor genome. Whilst fresh frozen (FF) derived WGS data provides optimal data ...quality, the majority of clinical biospecimens are from formalin fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) tissue which results in DNA damage and an increase in artifactual mutation calls. Development of analytical frameworks tailored to FFPE derived WGS data can unlock the potential of genome profiling in clinical oncology. We performed comprehensive WGS analysis on 58 matched FF/FFPE specimens derived from 3 cancer centers. Consensus calling detected high-confidence somatic mutations across variant classes including: single nucleotide variants (SNVs), insertions/deletions (indels), structural variants (SVs) and copy number aberrations (CNAs). For each sample, genome-wide mutational patterns including tumor mutational burden (TMB), SNV/indel signatures, and homologous recombination deficiency (HRD) scores were estimated. We developed a random forest based framework using 33 features to learn mutation patterns associated with FFPE artifacts and implemented a filtration strategy for FFPE derived WGS data within a clinical prototype analytical workflow. We identified a high degree of concordance (~91%, n=192/210) for oncogenic variants between FF/FFPE WGS data. Comparison of small mutation calls presented an average 2-fold increase in FFPE samples with a range up to 152x for SNVs and 43x for indels. However, this was not the case for SVs: -0.4x (range -0.8-1.4). We demonstrate that genome-wide mutation patterns were significantly affected, impacting estimates for TMB, HRD and signature contributions. On average, TMB was overestimated in FFPE (median=10.3, range: 1.4-94) versus FF (median=3.4, range:0.04-29.6). For 7 patients with evidence of HRD in FF, HRD scores did not reach statistical significance in FFPE. Mutational signatures in FFPE were enriched for COSMIC signatures 37 and 5. Our artifact classification model achieved ROC AUC of 97.5% and precision-recall of 98.9%. Post artifact filtration, precision in SNV/indel calling was increased from 49.3% to 93.4% and 61.8% to 82.7% respectively with no effect on driver alterations. This increased global signal concordance drastically, with comparable TMB scores (median 2.4; range .03-26.1) and improved cosine similarity for SNV/indel signatures (median 0.98; range 0.40-1). HRD was successfully detected in 7/7 patients from FFPE derived data post filtering with probability scores ranging from 0.76-1. We demonstrate that FFPE specimens harbor a variable increase in artifactual mutation burden in SNV/indels but not in SVs. We propose an effective filtering procedure which successfully removes FFPE related artifacts enabling accurate profiling of clinically relevant driver mutations and genome-wide mutation patterns from readily available FFPE-derived tumor specimens.
Citation Format: Dylan Domenico, Gunes Gundem, Max F. Levine, Juanes E. Arango-Ossa, Pauline Robbe, Georgios Asimomitis, Cassidy Cobbs, Emily Stockfisch, Janine Senz, Dawn Cochrane, Neeman Mohibullah, Neerav Shukla, Sohrab P. Shah, Andrew McPherson, Anna Schuh, Andrew L. Kung, Elli Papaemmanuil. Enabling whole genome sequencing analysis from FFPE specimens in clinical oncology abstract. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2023; Part 1 (Regular and Invited Abstracts); 2023 Apr 14-19; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2023;83(7_Suppl):Abstract nr 3142.
The environmental situation and current yield performance of sugar beet production in Germany are described and compared to those in other European regions. A continuous increase in yield performance ...and enhanced technical quality have been achieved through progress in breeding and improvements in crop management systems. This rise in yield potential has been brought about not by increased production intensity, but by better use of natural resources and production factors. In Germany, legislation rules many environmental aspects of agricultural plant production, and special laws are in force concerning fertilizer use, soil protection, and pesticide use. In sugar beet, nitrogen fertilizer use has decreased greatly and may be reduced further in some regions. A further reduction of potassium and phosphorus fertilizer use does not seem to be appropriate. Conservation tillage contributes to soil protection and is already performed on > 100 000 ha of land growing sugar beet. Strategies of integrated production aim to reduce pesticide use to the bare minimum. Integrated pest management is effective to control insects, nematodes and leaf spot diseases. Pesticide use in sugar beet is dominated by herbicide application. The most promising strategy to reduce the amount of active ingredient seems to be the growing of genetically modified herbicide-tolerant varieties. Possible directions for future research are discussed, and the prospects for sustainable development, in terms of economic, ecological and social factors, are considered.
