Supporting Information.doc (189 kB)
Circulating serum miRNAs as diagnostic markers for colorectal cancer
Colorectal
cancer (CRC) is one of the most common malignant neoplasms worldwide, being the
second in females and the third in males with 1.2 million annual new cases
worldwide. It has been previously addressed that patients with inflammatory
bowel disease (IBD) are usually associated with an increased risk of
progression to epithelial dysplasia and CRC. The miRNAs represent an interesting class of
small noncoding RNAs that act as posttranscriptional regulators of gene
expression through binding to the 3`untranslated regions (UTR) of the target
mRNAs and promoting mRNA degradation or translational repression. Cumulative
evidence indicates that some miRNAs can behave either as oncomirs or tumor
suppressor genes in the cascade of CRC .Therefore, they possess the potentiality
to be used as diagnostic, prognostic or therapeutic tumor markers. Our study
highlighted the role of aberrant miRNAs expressions in the development and
progression of CRC cases the
expression levels of 14 miRNAs (miR-17,
miR-18a, miR-19a, miR-19b, miR-20a, miR-21, miR-146a, miR-223, miR-24, miR-454,
miR-183, miR-135a, miR- 135b and miR- 92a) using the custom miScript miRNA PCR-based sybergreen array at different stages of colorectal carcinogenesis
cascade. The study involved two sample sets: 1- a training set which included 90 patients with colorectal related disease (30
with CRC, 18 with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), 18 with colonic polyps (CP)
and 24 with different colonic symptoms but without any colonoscopic abnormality
who were enrolled as control group) and 2- a validation set which included 100 CRC patients. The rational for selection of studied 14 miRNAs was
based on prior references which illustrated their role in colorectal carcinogenesis
(S1 table). The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC)
was used to evaluate the diagnostic
performance of the studied miRNAs for colorectal cancer diagnosis.We have found that (miR-17, miR-19a, miR-20a and miR-223) could
be used as diagnostic biomarkers for CRC. On the other hand, miR-19b and
miR-18a could be used as diagnostic biomarkers for CP and IBD respectively