Skip to content
Prev 16283 / 21307 Next

[Bioc-devel] MRD measurements in Leukemic patients using NGS data in r

a few thoughts:

1) look into Shearwater (
https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/deepSNV.html), then

2) talk to Todd Druley @ WashU, Elli Pappaemanuil @ MSKCC, Ruud & Bob @
Erasmus, the usual suspects

3) plan to validate w/ddPCR (at the absolute very least) and be aware that
most MRD in leukemia is done by a combination of BCR/TCR + breakpoint PCR
(lymphoid/fusion-driven) or DFN flow (myeloid + normal cyto)

not saying that ML-based methods might not help, but if you've got a
30x-100x genome (or even 1000x FM1) and are trying to compete with existing
standard approaches that can detect molecules at 1e-6, it'll be rough.  An
alternative approach (that has been used repeatedly) is to throw caution to
the wind, generate primers for numerous subject-specific somatic variants,
and use the ensemble to try and model MRD (speaking of ML). On the one
hand, that could give the clinic a "customer for life"; on the other hand,
it's not conducive to large-scale automation & deployment. As far as I
know, it never got much traction, in leukemia or anywhere else.  (Consider
that flow cytometry is capable of detecting 1-in-10K to 1-in-a-million
cells in most clinical flow labs.)

Best of luck! (and if you're not already working with UMI-tagged reads,
please talk to the people in #2 above; the reason most people won't go
below 5% VAF is that you get thwacked by error rates at that level, and the
reason most NGS-based MRD is based on UMIs is that existing PCR-based
methods have 6 logs sensitivity.)

--t
On Thu, Mar 5, 2020 at 4:08 PM Mulder, R <r.mulder01 at umcg.nl> wrote: