Yang and colleagues [4] are to be congratulated for combining cutting-edge biological knowledge with state-of-the-art bioinformatics in building a cancer prediction model. Scrutiny of this provocative model is certain to result in modifications and refinements to it as the underlying assumptions (of both the model and past experiments) are challenged and the understanding of the underlying biology improves. At the outset, we note that there are a few important assumptions and limitations in this work.
First, the stem cell division rates applied in this work are derived from those presented in Tomasetti and Vogelstein [6]. While this is reasonable, as Tomasetti and Vogelstein indicate in their work [6] there is room for improvement in the estimates they present. In addition, the current model is tested in cancer tissues and shows universal increases, but the authors have not yet shown evidence of prediction of risk in a prospective setting, where availability of data is still very limited. The current model does not include or apply estimates of the contribution that somatic alterations in non-stem cells (in any tissue or tissue environment) may make to tick rate. Altered somatic cells, particularly in tissues with higher levels of carcinogen exposure, may have non-stem cells that propagate alterations and increase the estimated tick rate of the mitotic clock. We also note here that the potential contribution of immunity and inflammation, which are particularly important in many solid tumors, is not yet specifically included in the model. The current model is also built, appropriately, using data from just one tissue source, and additional methylation data from normal tissues in healthy subjects are needed to expand and further examine the predictions of the model. Finally, reference-free and reference-based approaches would have to be properly applied to adjust for cellular heterogeneity in the setting of various other normal tissue types.
We also highlight that, as the authors note, this model necessarily assumes that methylation at the informative loci occurs only in stem cells. This is novel biology for which there is little to no experimental evidence. If true, it would imply that locus specificity in methylation is differentially determined in numerous distinct cellular and tissue-specific compartments.