Towards a clinical use of miRNAs in pancreatic cancer biopsies

Abstract

Evaluation of: Ali S, Saleh H, Sethi S, Sarkar FH, Philip PA. MicroRNA profiling of diagnostic needle aspirates from patients with pancreatic cancer. Br. J. Cancer 107(8), 1354–1360 (2012).

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a devastating disease, despite advances in imaging, surgery and a greater understanding of its molecular biology. Patient outcomes remain poor due to an inability to detect disease early and resistance to anticancer treatments. miRNAs are promised to become ideal cancer biomarkers, as they are tumor and tissue specific and also incredibly stable molecules. So far, large profiling studies of the PDAC miRNome have identified the ‘usual suspects’ known to be deregulated in solid tumors, such as oncomiR-21, as well as others that could be more robust for differentiating malignant from benign pancreatic disease. However, many of these are yet to be validated clinically. The paper under evaluation provides further evidence for the use of miRNAs as diagnostic biomarkers for PDAC. We have reviewed the use of miRNAs as diagnostic analytes for detecting PDAC in biopsies.

Keywords::

• biomarker
• diagnostic
• endoscopic ultrasound
• fine-needle aspirate
• let-7
• miR-200c
• miR-451
• miRNA
• pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma

Financial & competing interests disclosure

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.