Abstract
Tumor biomarkers developed based on the aberrant deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) methylation patterns in bladder cancer (BC) hold great promise due to their stability, specificity, and known associations with the disease. No study has investigated DNA methylation patterns in BC patients from Saudi population. We analyzed DNA methylation levels of 48 tumor suppressor genes loci in 24 bladder tissues (19 BC and 5 control samples) using Human Tumour Suppressor Genes EpiTect Methyl II Complete PCR Array (Qiagen, Hilden, Germany). We identified significant difference in DNA hypermethylation levels at E2F1, ERBB2, HIC1, OPCML, SFN, SFRP1, SFRP2, SPARC, and TERT gene loci between controls and cancerous samples. SCGB3A1 was differentially methylated in nonmuscle invasive versus muscle invasive BC samples. Results suggest that these aberrant DNA methylation patterns in BC are disease and population specific and can be developed as distinct DNA methylation-based biomarkers for BC detection.