Circulating microRNAs in plasma of patients with gastric cancers

Abstract

BACKGROUND: We examined plasma microRNA (miRNA) concentrations from patients with gastric cancers (GCs) to assess their clinical application for diagnosing and monitoring diseases. METHODS: We initially investigated the appropriateness of plasma miRNA assay, and then compared plasma miRNA results with the expressions in cancer tissues from eight GC patients, and also compared plasma miRNAs between pre-and post-operative paired samples from 10 GC patients. Then, plasma miRNAs (miR-17-5p, miR-21, miR-106a, miR-106b and let-7a) were analysed in 69 GC patients and 30 healthy volunteers in total. RESULTS: The initial analysis showed that miRNAs were stable and detectable in all plasma samples, and the plasma miRNA levels reflected the tumour miRNAs in most cases. The levels of these miRNAs were significantly reduced in post-operative samples. In large-scale analysis, the plasma concentrations of miRNAs (miR-17-5p, miR-21, miR-106a, miR-106b) were significantly higher in GC patients than controls (P ¼ 0.05, 0.006, 0.008 and o0.001 respectively), whereas let-7a was lower in GC patients (P ¼ 0.002). The values of the area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve were 0.721 for the miR-106b assay and 0.879 for the miR-106a/ let-7a ratio assay. CONCLUSION: Detection of circulating miRNAs might provide new complementary tumour markers for GC.

Identification of Serum MicroRNA-21 as a Biomarker for Early Detection and Prognosis in Human Epithelial Ovarian Cancer

“…In Zheng's study, patients with gastric cancer display a significantly higher level of miR-21 in peripheral blood than those from controls. The miR-21 level was associated with the tumor node metastasis (TNM) stage, tumor size and tissue categories (Tsujiura et al, 2010). Wang and his colleagues revealed that serum miR-21 was elevated in patients with non-small cell lung cancer, and high serum miR-21 was significantly correlated with tumor-node metastases stage, lymph node metastasis, and shorter survival .…”

The correlation of circulating pro‐angiogenic miRNAs’ expressions with disease risk, clinicopathological features, and survival profiles in gastric cancer

“…Thus, the exploration of novel and feasible biomarkers for prognosis is essential for improving outcomes in GC patients. Currently, growing evidences have disclosed that the expressions of miRNAs originating from tumor tissues are detectable in blood samples by dissociation of cancer cells or transformation via exosome in cancer patients, and several miRNAs expressions in blood are shown to be correlated with the risk and clinicopathological features of various cancers 69, 70, 71. In this present study, we found that high expressions of 4 circulating pro‐angiogenic miRNAs including miR‐17‐5p, miR‐18a, miR‐20a, and miR‐210 were independent predictive factors for worse DFS and OS in GC patients; furthermore, the combination of these 4 circulating pro‐angiogenic miRNAs presented even better prognostic value for prognosis than individual one in GC patients.…”

Self-Assembled Pico-Liter Droplet Microarray for Ultrasensitive Nucleic Acid Quantification

“…3,6,20,21 Most microRNAs studies on cancer and cardio-vascular diseases report microRNA concentrations from 1 fM to 1 pM. [22][23][24][25][26] With a detection limit of 50 aM and 570 copies and 6 orders of magnitude dynamic range without sample amplification, our device holds promise for point-of-care diagnosis of infectious diseases, cancers, brain injuries, and other diseases from short DNA fragments and microRNAs.…”