Person:

Houseman, Eugene Andres

Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is a rapidly fatal tumor with increasing incidence worldwide responsible for many thousands of deaths annually. Although there is a clear link between exposure to asbestos and mesothelioma, and asbestos is known to be both clastogenic and cytotoxic to mesothelial cells, the mechanisms of causation of MPM remain largely unknown. However, there is a rapidly emerging literature that describes inactivation of a diverse array of tumor suppressor genes (TSGs) via promoter DNA CpG methylation in MPM, although the etiology of these alterations remains unclear. We studied the relationships among promoter methylation silencing, asbestos exposure, patient demographics and tumor histology using a directed approach; examining six cell cycle control pathway TSGs in an incident case series of 70 MPMs. Promoter hypermethylation of APC, CCND2, CDKN2A, CDKN2B, HPPBP1 and RASSF1 were assessed. We observed significantly higher lung asbestos body burden if any of these cell cycle genes were methylated (P < 0.02), and there was a significant trend of increasing asbestos body counts as the number of methylated cell cycle pathway genes increased from 0 to 1 to >1 (P < 0.005). This trend of increasing asbestos body count and increasing number of methylated cell cycle pathway genes remained significant (P < 0.05) after controlling for age, gender and tumor histology. These data suggest a novel tumorigenic mechanism of action of asbestos and may contribute to the understanding of precisely how asbestos exposure influences the etiology and clinical course of malignant mesothelioma.

Epigenetic control of gene transcription is critical for normal human development and cellular differentiation. While alterations of epigenetic marks such as DNA methylation have been linked to cancers and many other human diseases, interindividual epigenetic variations in normal tissues due to aging, environmental factors, or innate susceptibility are poorly characterized. The plasticity, tissue-specific nature, and variability of gene expression are related to epigenomic states that vary across individuals. Thus, population-based investigations are needed to further our understanding of the fundamental dynamics of normal individual epigenomes. We analyzed 217 non-pathologic human tissues from 10 anatomic sites at 1,413 autosomal CpG loci associated with 773 genes to investigate tissue-specific differences in DNA methylation and to discern how aging and exposures contribute to normal variation in methylation. Methylation profile classes derived from unsupervised modeling were significantly associated with age (P<0.0001) and were significant predictors of tissue origin (P<0.0001). In solid tissues (n = 119) we found striking, highly significant CpG island–dependent correlations between age and methylation; loci in CpG islands gained methylation with age, loci not in CpG islands lost methylation with age (P<0.001), and this pattern was consistent across tissues and in an analysis of blood-derived DNA. Our data clearly demonstrate age- and exposure-related differences in tissue-specific methylation and significant age-associated methylation patterns which are CpG island context-dependent. This work provides novel insight into the role of aging and the environment in susceptibility to diseases such as cancer and critically informs the field of epigenomics by providing evidence of epigenetic dysregulation by age-related methylation alterations. Collectively we reveal key issues to consider both in the construction of reference and disease-related epigenomes and in the interpretation of potentially pathologically important alterations.

Background: Solid tumors, including head and neck squamous cell carcinomas (HNSCC), arise as a result of genetic and epigenetic alterations in a sustained stress environment. Little work has been done that simultaneously examines the spectrum of both types of changes in human tumors on a genome-wide scale and results so far have been limited and mixed. Since it has been hypothesized that epigenetic alterations may act by providing the second carcinogenic hit in gene silencing, we sought to identify genome-wide DNA copy number alterations and CpG dinucleotide methylation events and examine the global/local relationships between these types of alterations in HNSCC. Methodology/Principal Findings: We have extended a prior analysis of 1,413 cancer-associated loci for epigenetic changes in HNSCC by integrating DNA copy number alterations, measured at 500,000 polymorphic loci, in a case series of 19 primary HNSCC tumors. We have previously demonstrated that local copy number does not bias methylation measurements in this array platform. Importantly, we found that the global pattern of copy number alterations in these tumors was significantly associated with tumor methylation profiles (p<0.002). However at the local level, gene promoter regions did not exhibit a correlation between copy number and methylation (lowest q = 0.3), and the spectrum of genes affected by each type of alteration was unique. Conclusion/Significance: This work, using a novel and robust statistical approach demonstrates that, although a “second hit” mechanism is not likely the predominant mode of action for epigenetic dysregulation in cancer, the patterns of methylation events are associated with the patterns of allele loss. Our work further highlights the utility of integrative genomics approaches in exploring the driving somatic alterations in solid tumors.

Although tumor size and lymph node involvement are the current cornerstones of breast cancer prognosis, they have not been extensively explored in relation to tumor methylation attributes in conjunction with other tumor and patient dietary and hormonal characteristics. Using primary breast tumors from 162 (AJCC stage I–IV) women from the Kaiser Division of Research Pathways Study and the Illumina GoldenGate methylation bead-array platform, we measured 1,413 autosomal CpG loci associated with 773 cancer-related genes and validated select CpG loci with Sequenom EpiTYPER. Tumor grade, size, estrogen and progesterone receptor status, and triple negative status were significantly (Q-values <0.05) associated with altered methylation of 209, 74, 183, 69, and 130 loci, respectively. Unsupervised clustering, using a recursively partitioned mixture model (RPMM), of all autosomal CpG loci revealed eight distinct methylation classes. Methylation class membership was significantly associated with patient race (P<0.02) and tumor size (P<0.001) in univariate tests. Using multinomial logistic regression to adjust for potential confounders, patient age and tumor size, as well as known disease risk factors of alcohol intake and total dietary folate, were all significantly (P<0.0001) associated with methylation class membership. Breast cancer prognostic characteristics and risk-related exposures appear to be associated with gene-specific tumor methylation, as well as overall methylation patterns.