Granted Patent B2

US 12,606,874 · App. 19/088,591 · Granted Apr 21, 2026

Inventor: AmirAli Talasaz (Atherton, CA)

Assignee: Guardant Health, Inc.

C12Q1/6886C12N15/1065C12Q1/6806C12Q1/6869C12Q1/6874G16B30/00G16B30/10C12Q2600/118C12Q2600/156C12Q2600/158C12Q2600/16

Abstract

Claims (29)

1 . A method for determining the presence or absence of one or more somatic mutations in a blood sample from a subject, comprising:

(a) providing polynucleotides from the blood sample of the subject, wherein the polynucleotides comprise at least cell-free deoxyribonucleic acid (cfDNA) molecules;

(b) ligating adapters to a plurality of the polynucleotides comprising the cfDNA molecules to produce adapter-ligated polynucleotides;

(c) amplifying a plurality of the adapter-ligated polynucleotides to produce amplified polynucleotides;

(d) enriching a plurality of the amplified polynucleotides for a plurality of exons or a whole exome to produce enriched polynucleotides;

(e) sequencing a plurality of the enriched polynucleotides to generate sequence reads;

(f) mapping a plurality of the sequence reads to a reference genome to generate mapped sequence reads; and

(g) determining a frequency of variant bases at one or more genomic positions from among the mapped sequence reads and distinguishing the variant bases as somatic in origin or germline in origin, thereby determining the presence or absence of one or more somatic mutations.

2 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the plurality of polynucleotides to which adapters are ligated further comprises cell-free ribonucleic acid (cfRNA) molecules.

3 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the providing comprises separating the blood sample into a soluble portion and a non-soluble portion, wherein the soluble portion comprises the cfDNA molecules.

4 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the adapters comprise molecular barcodes.

5 . The method of claim 4 , wherein ligating adapters to the plurality of the polynucleotides comprises ligating adapters to the polynucleotides such that the polynucleotides are tagged with n different combinations of molecular barcodes, wherein n is at least 2 and no more than 100,000*z, wherein z is a mean of an expected number of duplicate polynucleotides molecules in the blood sample that map to the same start and stop positions on a reference sequence.

6 . The method of claim 5 , wherein n is no more than 10,000*z.

7 . The method of claim 6 , wherein n is no more than 1,000*z.

8 . The method of claim 7 , wherein n is no more than 100*z.

9 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the enriching comprises the use of selective sequence capture with oligonucleotide probes.

10 . The method of claim 1 , further comprising grouping a plurality of the mapped sequence reads into families, each family amplified from the same adapter-ligated polynucleotide.

11 . The method of claim 10 , wherein the mapped sequence reads are grouped into families based at least on mapping to the same start and stop positions.

12 . The method of claim 5 , further comprising grouping a plurality of the mapped sequence reads into families, each family amplified from the same adapter-ligated polynucleotide, wherein the grouping is based on at least the molecular barcode sequence information.

13 . The method of claim 12 , wherein the grouping is further based on a combination of molecular barcode sequence information and mapping to the same start and stop positions.

14 . The method of claim 10 , wherein the mapped sequence reads within each family are collapsed to yield a base call.

15 . The method of claim 10 , further comprising:

determining a quantitative measure of polymorphic forms among the families; and

based on the determined quantitative measure of polymorphic forms, inferring a quantitative measure of polymorphic forms in the number of inferred unique tagged parent polynucleotides.

16 . The method of claim 15 , wherein the polymorphic forms comprise are selected from the group consisting of substitutions, insertions, deletions, inversions, microsatellite changes, transversions, translocations, fusions, methylation, hypermethylation, hydroxymethylation, acetylation, epigenetic variants, regulatory- associated variants and protein binding sites.

17 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the one or more somatic mutations comprise single nucleotide variants (SNVs) and/or insertions or deletions (indels).

18 . The method of claim 1 , further comprising determining partial copy number variation frequency, determining loss of heterozygosity, performing gene expression analysis, performing epigenetic analysis and/or performing hypermethylation analysis.

19 . The method of claim 1 , wherein step (g) comprises the use of one or more of Hidden Markov dynamic programming, support vector machine, Bayesian network, trellis decoding, Viterbi decoding, expectation maximization, Kalman filtering, or neural network methodologies.

20 . The method of claim 1 , further comprising analyzing sequences of immune cells from the subject.

Assignments (1)

Continuity (20)

References Cited (400)