Research Paper Volume 12, Issue 22 pp 23047—23066

Circulating non-coding RNA cluster predicted the tumorigenesis and development of colorectal carcinoma

Jie Li1, *, , Yifei Feng1, *, , Ding Heng2, *, , Ranran Chen1, *, , Yong Wang1, , Ziwei Xu1, , Dongsheng Zhang1, , Chuan Zhang1, , Yue Zhang1, , Dongjian Ji1, , Junwei Tang1, , Yueming Sun1, ,

  • 1 Department of General Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, PR China
  • 2 Department of Gastroenterology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, PR China
* Equal contribution

Received: April 15, 2020       Accepted: August 27, 2020       Published: November 21, 2020      

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.104055
How to Cite

Copyright: © 2020 Li et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) is the most significant plasma biomarker in colorectal cancer (CRC), which is mainly used to diagnose and monitor the recurrence of CRC. However, due to the low sensitivity of CEA, it is more recommended for postoperative surveillance rather than early diagnosis. It is necessary to find efficient biomarkers for CRC. In this study, the expression of plasma non-coding RNAs was confirmed in three independent cohorts with total 1201 participants. First, 12 non-coding RNAs were screened from 9 plasma samples by using microarray. The expression of selected non-coding RNAs was further validated by multiphase detection and risk score analysis. We found that miR-20b-5p, miR-329-3p, miR-374b-5p, miR-503-5p, XLOC_001120 and ENSG00000243766.2 were significantly elevated in CRC plasma, and the AUC in training and validation set was 0.996 and 0.954, respectively. Moreover, miR-20b-5p, miR-329-3p and miR-503-5p were found elevated in plasma from larger tumors (5 cm as the cutoff) in CRC patients, and the merged AUC in training and validation set was 0.896 and 0.881. In conclusion, a panel of 6 non-coding RNAs showed their important clinical value for the early diagnosis of CRC. Among, miR-20b-5p, miR-329-3p and miR-503-5p might be the potential markers for evaluating larger tumor size of CRC.

Abbreviations

CRC: colorectal cancer; lncRNAs: long non-coding RNAs; qRT-PCR: quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction; ROC curve: Receiver Operating Characteristic curve; AUC: Area under the Curve; RSF: Risk score function.