Detecting statistically significant "hotspots" in gene therapy

One major hurdle in gene therapy is that introducing into host target cells a piece of genetic material (retrovirus) to handle a genetic disease may induce cancer. Tumorigenesis is thus suspected to be caused by insertion process called integration. Investigating whether a genetic area on the genome could be favoured by integration of a retrovirus in gene therapy, is a crucial aspect. These area are called “hot-spot”, or “common integration sites”(CIS). We propose a method for detecting hotspots based on the “Peaks-height distribution”, thus accounting for the integration distribution rather than based on integrations distances only.