Abstract PR009: Revisiting the bad luck hypothesis: Cancer risk and aging are linked to replication-driven changes to the epigenome

Aging is the leading risk factor for cancer. While some have proposed that the age-related accumulation of somatic mutations drives this relationship, it is likely not the full story. Here, we show that both aging and cancer share a common epigenetic replication signature, which we modeled from DNA methylation data in extensively passaged immortalized human cells in vitro and tested on clinical tissues. This epigenetic signature of replication – termed CellDRIFT – increased with age across multiple tissues, distinguished tumor from normal tissue, and was escalated in normal breast tissue from cancer patients. Additionally, within-person tissue differences were correlated with both predicted lifetime tissue-specific stem cell divisions and tissue-specific cancer risk. Overall, our findings suggest that age-related replication drives epigenetic changes in cells, potentially pushing them towards a more tumorigenic state. Citation Format: Christopher J. Minteer, Kyra Thrush, Peter Niimi, Joel Rozowsky, Jason Liu, Mor Frank, Thomas McCabe, Erin Hofstatter, Mariya Rozenblit, Lajos Pusztai, Kenneth Beckman, Mark Gerstein, Morgan E. Levine. Revisiting the bad luck hypothesis: Cancer risk and aging are linked to replication-driven changes to the epigenome [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the AACR Special Conference: Aging and Cancer; 2022 Nov 17-20; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;83(2 Suppl_1):Abstract nr PR009.