title: Cell-Free miR-27a, a Potential Diagnostic and Prognostic Biomarker for Gastric Cancer.
abstract: MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have been demonstrated to play an important role in carcinogenesis. Previous studies revealed that miRNAs are present in human plasma in a remarkably stable form that is protected from endogenous RNase activity. In this study, we measured the plasma expression levels of three miRNAs (miR-21, miR-27a, and miR-155) to investigate the usefulness of miRNAs for gastric cancer detection. We initially examined plasma miRNA expression levels in a screening cohort consisting of 15 patients with gastric cancer and 15 healthy controls from Korean population, using TaqMan quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction. We observed that the expression level of miR-27a was significantly higher in patients with gastric cancer than in healthy controls, whereas the miR-21 and miR-155a expression levels were not significantly higher in the patients with gastric cancer. Therefore, we further validated the miR-27a expression level in 73 paired gastric cancer tissues and in a validation plasma cohort from 35 patients with gastric cancer and 35 healthy controls. In both the gastric cancer tissues and the validation plasma cohort, the miR-27a expression levels were significantly higher in patients with gastric cancer. Receiver-operator characteristic (ROC) analysis of the validation cohort, revealed an area under the ROC curve value of 0.70 with 75% sensitivity and 56% specificity in discriminating gastric cancer. Thus, the miR-27a expression level in plasma could be a useful biomarker for the diagnosis and/or prognosis of gastric cancer.
authors.affiliation: Epigenome Research Center, Genome Institute, KRIBB, Daejeon 34141, Korea.
authors.forename: Jong-Lyul
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Park
authors.affiliation: Epigenome Research Center, Genome Institute, KRIBB, Daejeon 34141, Korea. ; Department of Functional Genomics, Korea University of Science and Technology, Daejeon 34141, Korea.
authors.forename: Mirang
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.affiliation: Department of Pathology, Chungnam National University College of Medicine, Daejeon 35015, Korea.
authors.forename: Kyu-Sang
authors.initials: KS
authors.lastname: Song
authors.affiliation: Epigenome Research Center, Genome Institute, KRIBB, Daejeon 34141, Korea. ; Department of Functional Genomics, Korea University of Science and Technology, Daejeon 34141, Korea.
authors.forename: Seon-Young
authors.initials: SY
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.affiliation: Epigenome Research Center, Genome Institute, KRIBB, Daejeon 34141, Korea. ; Department of Functional Genomics, Korea University of Science and Technology, Daejeon 34141, Korea.
authors.forename: Yong Sung
authors.initials: YS
authors.lastname: Kim
keywords: miR-27a; plasma; stomach neoplasms