Minimally invasive testing for early detection of lung cancer to improve patient survival is a major unmet clinical need. This study aimed to develop and validate a serum multi-microRNA (multimiR) panel as a minimally invasive test for early detection of nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC) regardless of smoking status, gender, and ethnicity. Our study included 744 NSCLC cases and 944 matched controls, including smokers and nonsmokers, male and female, with Asian and Caucasian subjects. Using RT-qPCR and a tightly controlled workflow, we quantified the absolute expression of 520 circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) in a Chinese cohort of 180 early stage NSCLC cases and 216 healthy controls (male smokers). Candidate biomarkers were verified in two case-control cohorts of 432 Chinese and 218 Caucasians, respectively (including females and nonsmokers). A multimiR panel for NSCLC detection was developed using a twofold cross-validation and validated in three additional Asian cohorts comprising 642 subjects. We discovered 35 candidate miRNA biomarkers, verified 22 of them, and developed a five-miR panel that detected NSCLC with area under curve (AUC) of 0.936–0.984 in the discovery and verification cohorts. The panel was validated in three independent cohorts with AUCs of 0.973, 0.916, and 0.917. The sensitivity of five-miR test was 81.3% for all stages, 82.9% for stages I and II, and 83.0% for stage I NSCLC, when the specificity is at 90.7%. We developed a minimally invasive five-miR serum test for detecting early stage NSCLC and validated its performance in multiple patient cohorts independent of smoking status, gender, and ethnicity.

Our previous study found copy number variation of chromosome fragment 5p13.1-13.3 might involve in the progression of ovarian cancer. In the current study, the alteration was validated and complement component 7 (C7), located on 5p13.1, was identified. To further explore the clinical value of C7 in tumors, 156 malignant, 22 borderline, 33 benign and 24 normal ovarian tissues, as well as 173 non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) tissues along with corresponding adjacent and normal tissues from the tissue bank of Zhejiang Cancer Hospital were collected. The expression of C7 was analyzed using reverse transcriptase quantitative polymerase chain reaction. As a result, the C7 expression displayed a gradual downward trend in normal, benign, borderline and malignant ovarian tissues, and the decreased expression of C7 was correlative to poor differentiation in patients with ovarian cancer. Interestingly, a similar change of expression of C7 was found in normal, adjacent and malignant tissues in patients with NSCLC, and low expression of C7 was associated with worse grade and advanced clinical stage. Both results from this cohort and the public database indicated that NSCLC patients with low expression of C7 had a worse outcome. Furthermore, multivariate cox regression analysis showed NSCLC patients with low C7 had a 3.09 or 5.65-fold higher risk for relapse or death than those with high C7 respectively, suggesting C7 was an independent prognostic predictor for prognoses of patients with NSCLC. Additionally, overexpression of C7 inhibited colony formation of NSCLC cells, which hints C7 might be a potential tumor suppressor.

T he provision of essential supplies is a key service provided by retailers when demand spikes due to consumer stockpiling during environmental emergencies. Moreover, it is important for retailers to quickly recover from these events by replenishing the stock of essential supplies to meet the continuing needs of local residents. The main purpose of this research is to study consumer precautionary stockpiling behavior prior to the onset of hurricane landfalls and determine the impact of this behavior on in-store product availability for various formats of retail store outlets. Specifically, we focus on the bottled water product category, an essential emergency category in hurricane preparedness. This study combines an event analysis methodology with econometric models using archival retail scanner data from 60 US retail chains located in 963 counties and real-time data from four recent US continental hurricanes. We find that supply-side characteristics (retail network and product variety), demand-side characteristics (hurricane experience and household income), and disaster characteristics (hazard proximity and hazard intensity) significantly affect consumer stockpiling propensity as the hurricanes approach. The increased consumer stockpiling has immediate and longer-term impacts on retail operations, namely, in-store product availability. Among various retail formats, drug stores are associated with the highest consumer stockpiling propensity before hurricanes, while dollar stores and discount stores are associated with the lowest in-store product availability following hurricanes. Our study points to the need for retailers and policymakers to carefully monitor factors affecting consumer stockpiling behavior that will allow for better allocation of critical supplies during the hurricane season.