PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Adwait Sathe AU - Yu-An Zhang AU - Xiaotu Ma AU - Pradipta Ray AU - Daniela Cadinu AU - Yi-Wei Wang AU - Xiao Yao AU - Xiaoyun Liu AU - Hao Tang AU - Yunfei Wang AU - Ying Huang AU - Changning Liu AU - Jin Gu AU - Martin Akerman AU - Yifan Mo AU - Chao Cheng AU - Zhenyu Xuan AU - Lei Chen AU - Guanghua Xiao AU - Yang Xie AU - Luc Girard AU - Hongyang Wang AU - Stephen Lam AU - Ignacio I Wistuba AU - Li Zhang AU - Adi F Gazdar AU - Michael Q Zhang TI - SCT promoter methylation is a highly discriminative biomarker for lung and many other cancers AID - 10.1101/018515 DP - 2015 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 018515 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/04/24/018515.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/04/24/018515.full AB - Aberrant DNA methylation has long been implicated in cancers. In this work we present a highly discriminative DNA methylation biomarker for non-small cell lung cancers and fourteen 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 3 immortalized human respiratory epithelium cells. In addition, we found that SCT promoter was methylated in 23 cancer cell lines involving >10 cancer types profiled by ENCODE. We found that SCT promoter is hyper-methylated in primary tumors from TCGA lung cancer cohort. Additionally, we found that SCT promoter is methylated at high frequencies in fifteen malignancies and is not methylated in ∼1000 non-cancerous tissues across >30 organ types. Our study indicates that SCT promoter methylation is a highly discriminative biomarker for lung and many other cancers.