Abstract
The identification of new less invasive biomarkers is necessary to improve the detection and prognostic outcome of respiratory pathological processes. The measurement of miRNA expression through less invasive techniques such as plasma and serum have been suggested to analysis of several lung malignancies including lung cancer. These studies are assuming a common deregulated miRNA expression both in blood and lung tissue. The present study aimed to obtain miRNA representative signatures both in plasma and bronchoalveolar cell fraction that could serve as biomarker in respiratory diseases. Ten patients were evaluated to assess the expression levels of 381 miRNAs. We found that around 50% miRNAs were no detected in both plasma and bronchoalveolar cell fraction and only 20% of miRNAs showed similar expression in both samples. These results show a lack of association of miRNA signatures between plasma and bronchoalveolar cytology in the same patient. The profiles are not comparable; however, there is a similarity in the relative expression in a very small subset of miRNAs (miR-17, miR-19b, miR-195 and miR-20b) between both biological samples in all patients. This finding supports that the miRNAs profiles obtained from different biological samples have to be carefully validated to link with respiratory diseases.
Highlights
There is a growing interest in the identification of new biomarkers for diagnosis in early stage, progression and treatment response in lung diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or lung cancer [1,2]
Is reflected in plasma the status of miRNA signatures present in the bronchoalveolar cytology? We have explored this point in order to find a new, sensitive, and noninvasive method to obtain a biomarker in peripheral blood for respiratory diseases
Taking a closer look at the 28 co-ordinately regulated miRNAs in plasma and bronchoalveolar cytology, we found that these miRNAs do not show significant expression differences in lung adenocarcinoma patients compared to the group without lung cancer
Summary
There is a growing interest in the identification of new biomarkers for diagnosis in early stage, progression and treatment response in lung diseases such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or lung cancer [1,2]. Nowadays, increasing evidence supports the use of microRNAs (miRNAs) as disease-specific biomarkers [3]. The discovery of miRNAs has revealed an unexpected level of gene expression regulation by interacting with messenger RNA [4,5]. MicroRNAs are small non-coding sequences of RNA, approximately 21 to 25 nucleotides long which expression may vary according to cell type, specific tissue or differentiation status [6,7,8,9]. The sequences of miRNAs regulate gene expression at the post-transcriptional level by base-pairing with target mRNA molecules [10]. MiRNAs play a pivotal role in a wide range of human diseases including cancer [11,12,13,14]
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