Abstract
BackgroundMicroRNAs have been considered as a kind of potential novel biomarker for cancer detection due to their remarkable stability in the blood and the characteristics of their expression profile in many diseases.MethodsWe performed microarray-based serum miRNA profiling on the serum of twenty nasopharyngeal carcinoma patients at diagnosis along with 20 non-cancerous individuals as controls. This was followed by a real-time quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-qPCR) in a separate cohort of thirty patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma and thirty age- matched non-cancerous volunteers. A model for diagnosis was established by a conversion of mathematical calculation formula which has been validated by analyzing 74 cases of patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma and 57 cases of non-cancerous volunteers.ResultsThe profiles showed that 39 and 17 miRNAs are exclusively expressed in the serum of non-cancerous volunteers and of patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma respectively. 4 miRNAs including miR-17, miR-20a, miR-29c, and miR-223 were found to be expressed differentially in the serum of NPC compared with that of non-cancerous control. Based on this, a diagnosis equation with Ct difference method has been established to distinguish NPC cases and non-cancerous controls and validated with high sensitivity and specificity.ConclusionsWe demonstrate that the serum miRNA-based biomarker model become a novel tool for NPC detection. The circulating 4-miRNA-based method may provide a novel strategy for NPC diagnosis.
Highlights
Nasopharyngeal carcinoma is rare in Europe, America and other western countries, while the rate of incidence is very high in China, Japan and other Southeast Asia [1,2]
A large number of clinical experiments have showed that the sensitivity and specificity of diagnosis by using Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)-related detection for nasopharyngeal carcinoma screening is not high, which cannot meet the requirements as a diagnostic marker
MiRNAs were extracted from the patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma and non-cancerous controls
Summary
We performed microarray-based serum miRNA profiling on the serum of twenty nasopharyngeal carcinoma patients at diagnosis along with 20 non-cancerous individuals as controls. This was followed by a real-time quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-qPCR) in a separate cohort of thirty patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma and thirty agematched non-cancerous volunteers. A model for diagnosis was established by a conversion of mathematical calculation formula which has been validated by analyzing 74 cases of patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma and 57 cases of noncancerous volunteers
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