A novel panel of blood-based microRNAs capable of discrimination between benign breast disease and breast cancer at early stages

ABSTRACT

Breast cancer (BC) as a leading cause of cancer death among women, exhibits a wide range of genetic heterogeneity in affected individuals. Satisfactory management of BC depends on early diagnosis and proper monitoring of patients’ response to therapy. In this study, we aimed to assess the relation between the expression patterns of blood-based microRNAs (miRNAs) with demographic characteristics of the patients with BC in an attempt to find novel diagnostic markers for BC with acceptable precision in clinical applications. To this end, we performed comprehensive statistical analysis of the data of the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database and the blood miRNome dataset (GSE31309). As a result, 21 miRNAs were selected for experimental verification by quantitative RT-PCR on blood samples of 70 BC patients and 60 normal individuals (without any lesions or benign breast diseases). Statistical one-way ANOVA revealed no significant difference in the blood levels of the selected miRNAs in BC patients compared to any lesions or benign breast diseases. However, the multi-marker panel consisting of hsa-miR-106b-5p, −126-3p, −140-3p, −193a-5p, and −10b-5p could detect early-stages of BC with 0.79 sensitivity, 0.86 specificity and 0.82 accuracy. Furthermore, this multi-marker panel showed the potential of detecting benign breast diseases from BC patients with 0.67 sensitivity, 0.80 specificity, and 0.74 accuracy. In conclusion, these data indicate that the present panel might be considered an asset in detecting benign breast disease and BC.

KEYWORDS:

• MicroRNA biomarker
• cancer detection
• blood-based microRNA
• clinical bioinformatics
• TCGA

Acknowledgments

We would appreciate all medical staffs and technicians at Royan Institute who agreed to participate in this study. Further, we would like to express our deep gratitude to Dr. Hamidreza Chitsaz, Dr. Safa Najafi, and Dr.Parisa Sahranavard for their generous support during this work and Cancer Charity for its financial support.

The results shown here are in part based upon data generated by the TCGA Research Network: https://www.cancer.gov/tcga.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Data availability

The initial high-throughput datasets are available in The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) databases. Moreover, the experimental data are available as Supplementary Table S7. More information are available upon request to Marzieh Lashkari at [email protected] or Mehdi Totonchi at [email protected].

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National cancer control charity fundation; Royan Institute; Tehran University of Medical Sciences and Health Services.