Abstract
Cancer has been regarded as one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide. Diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers with high sensitivity and specificity for cancer play a crucial role in preventing or treating cancer. Circular RNAs (circRNAs), which hold great potential for the management of cancer patients due to their abundance, stable property, and high specificity in serum, plasma, and other body fluids, can be used as non-invasive and blood-based biomarkers in cancer diagnosis and prognosis. There are four types of circRNAs including exonic circRNAs (ecircRNA), intronic circRNAs, exon-intron circRNAs (EIciRNA), and intergenic circRNAs. CircRNAs can act as miRNA sponges, affect protein translation, interplay with RNA binding proteins, regulate protein recruitment, and modulate protein scaffolding and assembly. Therefore, the multifunctionalities of circRNAs make them ideal for detecting and predicting cancer. Indeed, circRNAs manifest high sensitivity and specificity in more than ten types of cancer. This review aims to consolidate the types and functions of circRNAs, as well as discuss the diagnostic and prognostic value of circulating circRNAs in cancer.
Highlights
Cancer, which was estimated to lead to 18.1 million new cases and 9.6 million deaths according to GLOBOCAN 2018, is regarded as one of the most detrimental disease to our society [1,2,3,4,5,6]
CircMYC was highly expressed in patients with Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) as well, and the expression was significantly correlated with tumor size, lymphatic metastasis, tumor-node- metastasis stage (TNM stage), survival rate and disease recurrence
The study has shown that the plasma level of circGSK3β was reduced in 75% of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) patients after surgery, while that of circGSK3β was increased in ESCC patients with recurrence/metastasis 10 months after surgery, suggesting the plasma level of circGSK3β has predictive values for clinical improvement
Summary
Cancer, which was estimated to lead to 18.1 million new cases and 9.6 million deaths according to GLOBOCAN 2018, is regarded as one of the most detrimental disease to our society [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Given the concealment and non-specificity of clinical manifestations, most cancer cases are diagnosed at advanced stages. Taking tissue biopsies and imaging examinations as well as using cancer biomarkers are some of the most widely used methods in cancer diagnosis. Taking tissue biopsies is viewed as the gold standard of cancer diagnosis, there is a risk for patients with coagulation dysfunction or other concomitant diseases to take biopsies [11]. It is an urgent need to discover effective cancer biomarkers for people to prevent or to receive treatment at early stages of cancer
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