BioProject

The aim of this study was to examine the expression profiles of circulating miRNAs in the serum of patients with high-risk oral lesions (HRLs; oral cancer or carcinoma in situ) and to explore their utility as potential oral cancer biomarkers. More...

The aim of this study was to examine the expression profiles of circulating miRNAs in the serum of patients with high-risk oral lesions (HRLs; oral cancer or carcinoma in situ) and to explore their utility as potential oral cancer biomarkers. Global serum miRNA profiles were generated by quantitative PCR method from 1) patients diagnosed with HRLs and undergoing intent-to-cure surgical treatment (N = 30) and 2) a demographically-matched, normal control group (N = 26). We next honed our list of serum miRNAs associated with disease by reducing the effects of inter-patient variability; we compared serum miRNA profiles from samples taken both before and after tumor resections (N = 10). Based on these analyses, fifteen miRNAs were significantly up-regulated and five were significantly down-regulated based on presence of disease (minimum fold-change >2 in at least 50% of samples, p < 0.05, permutation t-test). Five of these miRNAs (miR-16, let-7b, miR-338-3p, miR-223, and miR-29a) yielded an area under the ROC curve (AUC) >0.8, suggesting utility as non-invasive biomarkers for detection of oral cancer or high grade lesions. Overall design: qPCR miRNA expression profiling of serum samples. The sample size for control and HRL cases are indicated in the summary. The samples were not processed in replicate. Dataset 1: Samples from pre-surgery HRL patients (N = 30) and normal controls (N = 26). Dataset 2: Samples taken both before and after tumor resections (N = 10). Processed separately from Dataset 1. Less...