<p>Diagnostic Significance of Downregulated circMORC3 as a Molecular Biomarker of Hypopharyngeal Squamous Cell Carcinoma: A Pilot Study</p>

Abstract

Background: Circular RNAs (circRNAs) have proven to be of great clinical significance as diagnostic biomarkers in various cancers. Here, we investigate the expression of circMORC3 in hypopharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (HSCC), exploring whether it could serve as a diagnostic marker of HSCC. Methods: CircMORC3 expression levels were detected in HSCC tissues and adjacent normal tissues using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). The relationships between circMORC3 expression levels and clinicopathologic factors were explored. CircMORC3 expression levels in plasma from HSCC patients and non-tumor patients were also detected by qRT-PCR. Finally, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were established to evaluate the diagnostic value of circMORC3 as a potential HSCC biomarker in tissues and plasma. Results: The expression levels of circMORC3 were significantly lower in HSCC tissues than paired adjacent normal tissues, and the area under the ROC curve was 0.834. The decreased expression of circMORC3 was correlated to T stages and tumor sizes. Similarly, the circMORC3 expression levels in HSCC patient plasma were lower than non-tumor patient plasma, and the area under the ROC curve was 0.767. Conclusion: Our results indicate that circMORC3 was downregulated in HSCC tissues and plasma, and it could serve as an early diagnostic HSCC biomarker.

Identification and Characterization of Circular RNA as a Novel Regulator and Biomarker in Preterm Birth

“…Eleven of these 20 circRNAs have never been reported before, and we speculated that their dysregulation might be specific for PTB. The remaining 9 circRNAs have been demonstrated to be correlated with breast cancer (hsa-SCARF1_0001), osteoarthritis (hsa-GCN1_0003), osteosarcoma (hsa-RAD54L2_002), virus infection (hsa-CREBBP_0001), ovarian cancer (hsa-FAM13B_0019), hepatocellular carcinoma (hsa-NUSAP1_0010), endometrial cancer (hsa-YY1AP1_0001), hypopharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (hsa-MORC3_0001), and gestational diabetes mellitus (hsa-RANBP9_0002) (Fu et al, 2018;Kun-Peng et al, 2018;Hu et al, 2019;Li et al, 2019;Lou et al, 2019;Wang et al, 2019Wang et al, , 2020Guo et al, 2020;Tran et al, 2020). Interestingly, we found that all these diseases shared a common pathological ground of inflammation and immune activation with PTB, which happens to be the main way that the selected circRNAs regulate these diseases (Cappelletti et al, 2016).…”

Diagnostic and prognostic value ofcircRNAsexpression in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma: A meta‐analysis

“…Finally, 55 articles that involved details regarding 56 unique circRNAs and 5,576 HNSCC cases (all cases were reliably diagnosed via histopathological analysis) were included in this meta‐analysis. To be specific, we included 31 diagnostic studies (from 23 articles 25–47 ), 38 prognostic studies (from 38 articles 25–30,48–79 ), and 27 clinical‐pathological feature‐related studies(from 26 articles 28,29,43,47,48,50,51,53,55,56,58,63–68,70–74,76–79 ).…”

Circular RNAs: Emerging Role in Cancer Diagnostics and Therapeutics

“…CircMATR3 binds to miR-188-5p and miR-448, both having a common target, USP28 . CircMORC3 downregulation in HSCC tissues and plasma samples was associated with tumor stage and tumor size (Zheng and Chen, 2020).…”