Granted Patent B2

US 12,571,034 · App. 18/075,180 · Granted Mar 10, 2026

Inventors: Bernhard Zimmermann (Manteca, CA); Ryan Swenerton (San Bruno, CA); Matthew Rabinowitz (San Francisco, CA); Styrmir Sigurjonsson (San Jose, CA); George Gemelos (Portland, OR); Apratim Ganguly (Daly City, CA); Himanshu Sethi (Sunnyvale, CA)

Assignee: Natera, Inc.

C12Q1/6869C12Q1/6806C12Q2525/179C12Q2535/122C12Q2563/179

Abstract

Claims (18)

1 . A method for preparing a DNA fraction from a biological sample of a subject useful for analyzing cancer mutations, comprising:

(a) extracting cell-free DNA from the biological sample;

(b) producing an enriched fraction of DNA by:

(i) ligating at least one adaptor to both ends of the extracted cell-free DNA or DNA derived therefrom to produce adapted DNA, wherein the adaptor comprises a universal priming sequence and a molecular index tag (MIT),

(ii) performing universal amplification on the adapted DNA using the universal priming sequence to produce amplified adapted DNA, and

(iii) selectively enriching for at least some of the amplified adapted DNA comprising one or more preselected loci to produce enriched DNA, wherein the selectively enriching comprises performing one-sided PCR using a universal primer and a plurality of target-specific primers to amplify at least some of the amplified adapted DNA comprising one or more preselected loci or using a plurality of hybrid capture probes to capture at least some of the amplified adapted DNA comprising one or more preselected loci; and

(c) analyzing the enrich fraction of DNA by performing massively parallel sequencing on the enriched DNA to obtain sequence reads, and using the sequence reads of the MIT and one or more preselected loci to identify one or more cancer mutations,

wherein the MIT substantially reduces the error rate of the method, wherein the error rate is calculated by counting all base calls across the preselected loci that do not correspond to a reference genome and dividing them by the total base calls across the preselected loci.

2 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the biological sample is a blood, plasma, serum, or urine sample.

3 . The method of claim 1 , wherein between 50 and 1,000 different MITs are used in the ligating step, wherein each MIT comprises 4 to 8 nucleotides in length, wherein the sequences of different MITs differ from each other by at least 2 nucleotides.

4 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the MIT is positioned internal to the universal priming sequence in the adapted DNA.

5 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the selectively enriching comprises performing one-sided PCR using a universal primer and a plurality of target-specific primers to amplify at least some of the amplified adapted DNA comprising one or more preselected loci.

6 . The method of claim 5 , wherein the one-sided PCR is a multiplex PCR targeting 10-5,000 different preselected loci.

7 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the selectively enriching comprises using a plurality of hybrid capture probe to capture at least some of the amplified adapted DNA comprising one or more preselected loci.

8 . The method of claim 7 , wherein the hybrid capture probes target 10-5,000 different preselected loci.

9 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the preselected loci comprise one or more of single nucleotide polymorphism or variant, or insertion or deletion.

10 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the enriched DNA is further amplified to introduce a sample-specific barcode, and wherein the enriched DNA from multiple samples are pooled and sequenced together.

11 . The method of claim 1 , wherein the method further comprises estimating the fraction of cancer DNA in the cell-free DNA based on the sequence reads.

Continuity (5)

References Cited (400)