Lung Cancer Detection by Screening - Presenting Circulating miRNAs as a Promising Next Generation Biomarker Breakthrough

Abstract

Lung cancer remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, accounting for more deaths than any other cause. All the clinical practice guidelines recommended against routine screening for lung cancer have cited lack of robust evidence, at least until a few years back. However, the potential to screen lung cancers has received renewed interest due to superior performance of low dose CT (LD-CT) in detecting early stage cancers. The incremental costs and risks involved due to the invasive procedures in the screened population due to a high false positivity rate questions the use of LD-CT scan as a reliable community based screening tool. There is therefore an urgent need to find a less invasive and a more reliable biomarker that is crucial to increase the probability of early lung cancer detection. This can truly make a difference in lung cancer survival and at the same time be more cost and resource utilization effective. Sampling blood serum being minimally invasive, low risk and providing an easy to obtain biofluid, needs to be explored for potential biomarkers. This review discusses the use of circulatory miRNAs that have been able to discriminate lung cancer patients from disease free controls. Several studies conducted recently suggest that circulating miRNAs may have promising future applications for screening and early detection of lung cancer.

Clinical Observations on the Association Between Diagnosis of Lung Cancer and Serum Tumor Markers in Combination

“…At present CEA is mainly used in the diagnosis of gastrointestinal cancer, however, it is reported that the sensitivity of CEA is around 35% to 77% (Ramshankar et al, 2013), our study suggested that the sensitivity of CEA in detecting lung cancer was 39.45%, and the specificity was 73.53%, that is in accordance with previous reports. Another finding of our study is that serum CEA in patients with lung cancer were significantly higher than those with benign disease and healthy controls (p< 0.05), indicating that CEA could be used in early diagnosis of lung cancer.…”

Expression of Tumor Necrosis Factor Receptor-associated Factor 6 in Lung Cancer Tissues

“…With the development of genomic and basic research, increasing numbers of cell molecular biomarkers have been considered as specific diagnosing and targeted therapeutic agents for lung cancer (Uribe and Gonzalez, 2011;Hirose et al, 2012;Brothers et al, 2013;Ramshankar and Krishnamurthy, 2013;Wang et al, 2013). However, clear molecular biomarkers for the clinical diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer have not been identified.…”

MicroRNAs: Biogenesis, Roles for Carcinogenesis and as Potential Biomarkers for Cancer Diagnosis and Prognosis

“…The levels of miR-101 and Cox-2 were negatively correlated in cervical cancer of Uyghur women, which may serve as biomarkers of diagnosis markers for cervical cancer in Uyghur women which provide direct experimental evidence for the roles of miRNA in diagnosis of cancer. Meanwhile, blood based tests for screening purposes or disease monitoring would be more suitable as they are minimally invasive, relatively have low cost and can be repeated as well (Ramshankar and Krishnamurthy, 2013). Because of this, Ramshankar and Krishnamurthy (2013) reported that the circulating miRNAs present in both serum and plasma as attractive candidates to be used as cancer biomarkers and could serve as non-invasive biomarkers for early detection and diagnosis of lung cancer.…”