Identification of Circular RNA hsa-circ-0006969 as a Novel Biomarker for Breast Cancer

Abstract

Background: To investigate the characteristics of circular RNA hsa-circ-0006969 in breast cancer and identify it as a novel biomarker for breast cancer. Methods: Three breast cancer (BC) patient tissues were selected to perform human circRNA microarray analysis. GeneSpring 13.0 (Agilent) software was applied for analyzing the data. Another 116 BC patients were recruited for verification. Hsa-circ-0006969 was found as a potential circRNA for BC diagnostic biomarker. The structure of hsa-circ-0006969 was predicted by circPrimer1.2 software. MiRanda v3.3, RNA hybrid 2.1, and Cytoscape 3.6.0 were used for predicting the networks of circRNA-miRNA. T-test, Curve regression, and ROC analysis were applied to certify the diagnostic values of hsa-circ-0006969. Using SPSS25.0 software to perform the Statistical analysis. Results: 546 higher expression and 1475 lower expression circRNAs were identified. Four circRNAs were filtrated for further verification. Hsa-circ-0006969 was significantly low expressed in BC tissues and peripheral blood. Hsa-circ-0006969 was confirmed as higher diagnostic correlation with BC tissues (AUC = 0.965) and peripheral blood (AUC = 0.842), with Grade 1 (AUC = 0.639), ER-positive (AUC = 0.612), TNM I (AUC = 0.693), TNM II (AUC = 0.712), TNM III (AUC = 0.757), TNM early stage(I, II) (AUC = 0.709). Hsa-circ-0006969 presented more effective diagnostic values for tumor metastasis (AUC = 0.784) compared with CA153 (AUC = 0.752). Conclusion: Hsa-circ-0006969 could be a novel biomarker for the diagnosis and treatment of BC.