Simulation-guided pan-cancer analysis identifies a novel regulator of CpG island hypermethylation heterogeneity.

CpG island hypermethylation, a hallmark of cancer, exhibits substantial heterogeneity across tumors, presenting both opportunities and challenges for cancer diagnostics and therapeutics. While this heterogeneity offers potential for patient stratification to predict clinical outcomes and personalize treatments, it complicates the development of robust biomarkers for early detection. Understanding the mechanisms driving this heterogeneity is essential for advancing biomarker design. Here, simulation-based analyses demonstrate that tumor purity and the high prevalence of low epi-mutation samples significantly obscure the identification of negative, rather than positive, regulators of CpG island hypermethylation, limiting a comprehensive understanding of heterogeneity sources. By addressing these confounders, we identify impaired DNA methylation maintenance, as indicated by global hypomethylation levels, as the primary contributor to CpG island hypermethylation variability among known regulators. This finding is supported by integrative analyses of datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) Pan-Cancer Atlas, Genomics of Drug Sensitivity in Cancer (GDSC1000) cancer cell lines, and epi-allele analyses of two independent whole-genome bisulfite sequencing cohorts, using a newly developed method, MeHist (https://github.com/vhang072/MeHist). Furthermore, we assess widely used hypermethylation biomarkers across ten cancer types and find that 65 out of 246 (26.4%) are significantly influenced by impaired methylation maintenance. Incorporating hypomethylation and hypermethylation markers improves the robustness of cancer detection, as validated across multiple plasma cell-free DNA datasets. In summary, our findings highlight the value of simulation-guided integrative analysis in mitigating confounding effects and identify impaired DNA methylation maintenance as a key regulator of CpG island hypermethylation heterogeneity.