Abstract
Retinoblastoma (RB) is a childhood cancer that forms in the developing retina of young children; this tumor cannot be biopsied due to the risk of provoking extraocular tumor spread, which dramatically alters the treatment and survival of the patient. Recently, aqueous humor (AH), the clear fluid in the anterior chamber of the eye, has been developed as an organ-specific liquid biopsy for investigation of in vivo tumor-derived information found in the cell-free DNA (cfDNA) of the biofluid. However, identifying somatic genomic alterations, including both somatic copy number alterations (SCNAs) and single nucleotide variations (SNVs) of the RB1 gene, typically requires either: (1) two distinct experimental protocols-low-pass whole genome sequencing for SCNAs and targeted sequencing for SNVs-or (2) expensive deep whole genome or exome sequencing. To save time and cost, we applied a one-step targeted sequencing method to identify both SCNAs and RB1 SNVs in children with RB. High concordance (median = 96.2%) was observed in comparing SCNA calls derived from targeted sequencing to the traditional low-pass whole genome sequencing method. We further applied this method to investigate the degree of concordance of genomic alterations between paired tumor and AH samples from 11 RB eyes. We found 11/11 AH samples (100%) had SCNAs, and 10 of them (90.1%) with recurrent RB-SCNAs, while only nine out of 11 tumor samples (81.8%) had positive RB-SCNA signatures in both low-pass and targeted methods. Eight out of the nine (88.9%) detected SNVs were shared between AH and tumor samples. Ultimately, 11/11 cases have somatic alterations identified, including nine RB1 SNVs and 10 recurrent RB-SCNAs with four focal RB1 deletions and one MYCN gain. The results presented show the feasibility of utilizing one sequencing approach to obtain SCNA and targeted SNV data to capture a broad genomic scope of RB disease, which may ultimately expedite clinical intervention and be less expensive than other methods.