SCT Promoter Methylation Is a Highly Discriminative Biomarker for Lung and Many Other Cancers

Aberrant DNA methylation has long been implicated in cancers. In this letter, we present a highly discriminative DNA methylation biomarker for non-small cell lung cancers (NSCLCs) and 14 other cancers. Based on 69 NSCLC cell lines and 257 cancer-free lung tissues, we identified a CpG island in SCT gene promoter, which was verified by qMSP experiment in 15 NSCLC cell lines and three immortalized human respiratory epithelium cells. In addition, we found that the SCT promoter was methylated in 23 cancer cell lines involving >10 cancer types profiled by ENCODE. We found that the SCT promoter is hypermethylated in primary tumors from TCGA lung cancer cohort. In addition, we found that SCT promoter is methylated at high frequencies in 15 malignancies and is not methylated in ~1000 non-cancerous tissues across >30 organ types. This letter indicates that SCT promoter methylation is a highly discriminative biomarker for lung and many other cancers.