We have developed and validated for the diagnosis of inherited colorectal cancer (CRC) a massive parallel sequencing strategy based on: (i) fast capture of exonic and intronic sequences from ten genes involved in Mendelian forms of CRC (MLH1, MSH2, MSH6, PMS2, APC, MUTYH, STK11, SMAD4, BMPR1A and PTEN); (ii) sequencing on MiSeq and NextSeq 500 Illumina platforms; (iii) a bioinformatic pipeline that includes BWA-Picard-GATK (Broad Institute) and CASAVA (Illumina) in parallel for mapping and variant calling, Alamut Batch (Interactive BioSoftware) for annotation, CANOES for CNV detection and finally, chimeric reads analysis for the detection of other types of structural variants (SVs).
Through germline multigene panel testing, we discovered the co-occurrence of Lynch syndrome due to a PMS2 mutation and juvenile polyposis syndrome due to a BMPR1A mutation in a young man with synchronous bladder and colorectal cancers and a family history of colorectal polyps.
Most of the approximately 13 high-penetrance genes that predispose to CRC primarily predispose to colorectal polyps, and each gene is associated with a specific type of polyp, whether conventional adenomas (APC, MUTYH, POLE, POLD1, NTHL1), juvenile polyps (SMAD4, BMPR1A), Peutz-Jeghers hamartomas (LKB1/STK11) and mixed polyps of serrated and juvenile types (GREM1).