Haplotype-based profiling of subtle allelic imbalance with SNP arrays

Due to limitations of surgical dissection and tumor heterogeneity, tumor samples collected for cancer genomics studies are often heavily diluted with normal tissue or contain subpopulations of cells harboring important aberrations. Methods for profiling tumor-associated allelic imbalance in such scenarios break down at aberrant cell proportions of 10%–15% and below. Here, we present an approach that offers a vast improvement for detection of subtle allelic imbalance, or low proportions of cells harboring aberrant allelic ratio among nonaberrant cells, in unpaired tumor samples using SNP microarrays. We leverage the expected pattern of allele-specific intensity ratios determined by an individual's germline haplotypes, information that has been ignored in existing approaches. We demonstrate our method on real and simulated data from the CRL-2324 breast cancer cell line genotyped on the Illumina 370K array. Assuming a 5 million SNP array, we can detect the presence of aberrant cells in proportions lower than 0.25% in the breast cancer sample, approaching the sensitivity of some minimal residual disease assays. Further, we apply a hidden Markov model to identify copy-neutral LOH (loss of heterozygosity) events as short as 11 Mb in mixtures of only 4% tumor using 370K data. We anticipate our approach will offer a new paradigm for genomic profiling of heterogeneous samples.