Hepatic mi R ‐126 is a potential plasma biomarker for detection of hepatitis B virus infected hepatocellular carcinoma

• Published in: International journal of cancer 2016-06, Vol.138 (11), p.2732-2744
• Main Authors: Ghosh, Amit, Ghosh, Alip, Datta, Somenath, Dasgupta, Debanjali, Das, Soumyajit, Ray, Sukanta, Gupta, Subash, Datta, Simanti, Chowdhury, Abhijit, Chatterjee, Raghunath, Mohapatra, Saroj Kant, Banerjee, Soma
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0020-7136; 1097-0215
• DOI: 10.1002/ijc.29999

Controversies about the origin of circulating miRNAs have encouraged us to identify organ specific circulating miRNAs as disease biomarkers. To identify liver‐specific miRNAs for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), global expression profiling of miRNAs in liver tissue of HBV‐HCC and HBV‐control with no or mild fibrosis was evaluated. A total of 40 differentially expressed miRNAs were identified in HCC. Among ten highly altered miRNAs, six miRNAs were successfully validated in tissues, whereas only two miRNAs, miR‐126 and miR‐142‐3p showed increased expression in plasma of HBV‐HCC compared to HBV‐non‐HCC patients. Subsequently, ROC curve analysis revealed that neither miR‐126 nor miR‐142‐3p performed better than AFP in discriminating HCC from non‐HCC while combination of each with AFP showed significantly higher efficiency rather than AFP alone (AUC: 0.922, 0.908 vs . 0.88; sensitivity: 0.84, 0.86 vs . 0.82 and specificity: 0.92, 0.94 vs . 0.86 respectively). Interestingly, triple combination of markers (miR‐126 + miR‐142‐3p + AFP) showed no additive effect on efficiency (AUC: 0.925) over the dual combination. Again, the expression of only miR‐126 was noticed significantly higher in HBV‐HCC patients with low‐AFP [