Leveraging sequences missing from the human genome to diagnose cancer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Cancer diagnosis using cell-free DNA (cfDNA) has the potential to improve treatment and survival but has several technical limitations. METHODS: In this study, we developed a prediction model based on neomers, DNA sequences 13-17 nucleotides in length that are predominantly absent from the genomes of healthy individuals and are created by tumor-associated mutations. RESULTS: We show that neomer-based classifiers can accurately detect cancer, including early stages, and distinguish subtypes and features. Analysis of 2577 cancer genomes from 21 cancer types shows that neomers can distinguish tumor types with higher accuracy than state-of-the-art methods. Generation and analysis of 465 cfDNA whole-genome sequences demonstrates that neomers can precisely detect lung and ovarian cancer, including early stages, with an area under the curve ranging from 0.89 to 0.94. By testing various promoters or over 9000 candidate enhancer sequences with massively parallel reporter assays, we show that neomers can identify cancer-associated mutations that alter regulatory activity. CONCLUSIONS: Combined, our results identify a sensitive, specific, and simple cancer diagnostic tool that can also identify cancer-associated mutations in gene regulatory elements.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".