Prostate cancer is a very heterogeneous disease with variable molecular phenotypes and clinical outcomes. The challenges and clinical unmet needs are to understand how the tumor evolves and effectively track the disease change along the treatment. Circulating cell-free DNA (ccfDNA) in plasma is fragmented DNA present in our circulation and analysis of plasma DNA occurs as an emerging clinical opportunity to enable us to trace tumor changes, and identify signatures associated with the outcomes. While most current plasma DNA analyses focus on genomic aberrations, DNA methylation is shown to be a stable, easily-quantifiable biomarker that is tissue-specific. My project is to profile methylome from low-input ccfDNA in plasma and our initial data indicates DNA methylation signatures extracted from plasma DNA could accurately estimates tumor fraction changes before and after treatments such as AR-targeting agent abiraterone or docetaxel.

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