Global signatures of Ribonucleotide Excision Repair deficiency and its therapeutic vulnerabilities

Abstract

Cancer therapies increasingly exploit DNA repair deficiencies, yet many clinically actionable repair-deficient states remain undetectable because they lack robust biomarkers and are not identifiable through gene-based diagnostics. Here, we show that deficiency of ribonucleotide excision repair (RER), a pathway that removes misincorporated ribonucleotides from genomic DNA, generates a distinct genome-wide mutational phenotype comprising characteristic insertion-deletion, substitution, and structural variation signatures. Using these features, we developed RERDetect, a whole-genome classifier that identifies RER-deficient tumors across diverse cancer types. Application of RERDetect to more than 11,000 primary and metastatic cancers revealed a recurrent subset of tumors with evidence of RER deficiency, the majority lacking detectable genetic alterations in RNASEH2 genes. We identified promoter hypermethylation of RNASEH2C as a recurrent mechanism of pathway inactivation. RER-deficient cells exhibited distinct vulnerabilities, including sensitivity to EXO1 and FANCM inhibition. These findings establish RER deficiency as a previously unrecognized and therapeutically actionable DNA repair-deficient state in cancer, demonstrating the power of mutational scars to identify clinically relevant tumor phenotypes that evade conventional genomic diagnostics.