Aberrant DNA methylation as sensitive and promising biomarkers in diagnosing of cancers

A recent study by Yu et al. and co-workers have provided potential usefulness of methylation of CDH1 promoter in preoperative peritoneal washes (PPW) as a marker for prognostic indicator in gastric cancer patients (1). Epigenetic gene silencing by promoter CpG islands hypermethylation and subsequent transcriptional gene silencing are important mechanisms in the inactivation of tumor suppressor genes (2). DNA methylation has been deeply involved in the development and progression of many types of cancer and extensive researches in this field have suggested strong potentiality for the DNA methylation signatures to prognostically differentiate cancers beyond current clinical classifications (3-6).