Serum microRNAs (miRNAs) can serve as biomarkers for the detection of diseases including cancer and diabetes, according to research published online this week in Cell Research. The findings pave the way for a revolutionary non-invasive diagnostic tool.
“Nowadays, almost all of the routinely used serum markers are proteins and the conventional methodologies used to measure them remain labor-intensive. No serum-based test is currently suitable for widespread use in diseases diagnosis, particularly in early tumor detection,” said Chen-Yu Zhang of School of Life Sciences, Nanjing University. “Our goal therefore was to discover a novel class of serum biomarkers for clinic uses, even for drug screening and personalized medicine.”
miRNAs are a class of naturally occurring small non-coding RNAs that have been linked with cancer development. Recent studies reporting individual miRNAs as diagnostic biomarkers of specific cancers were unable to rule out the possibility that these miRNAs appeared as a result of contamination.
Chen-Yu Zhang and colleagues are the first to comprehensively characterize entire blood miRNA profiles of healthy subjects and patients with lung cancer, colorectal cancer and diabetes, ruling out contamination. They propose that the specific serum miRNA expression profiles they identified constitute ‘fingerprints’ for cancer and disease.
Although tumour markers greatly improve diagnosis, current diagnostic techniques are prohibitively invasive and therefore have limited clinical application. The new approach is non-invasive and has the potential to transform the clinical management of various cancers and diseases through improving disease diagnosis, cancer classification, prognosis estimation, prediction of therapeutic efficacy, maintenance of surveillance following surgery, and the ability to forecast disease recurrence. The new technique will also be useful to pharmacological companies in identifying population subgroups who are responsive to drugs that have failed in phase III clinical trials.
The researchers include Xi Chen, Xing Cai, Yuan Yin, Kehui Wang, Jigang Guo, Yujing Zhang, Jiangning Chen, Xing Guo, Yan Zhang, Jin Wang, Xueyuan Jiang, Yang Xiang, Chen Xu, Hongjie Zhang, Ke Zen, Junfeng Zhang & Chen-Yu Zhang of Jiangsu Diabetes Center, State Key Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, School of Life Sciences, Nanjing University; Yi Ba, Xiaobin Shang, Ting Gong of Tianjin Medical University Cancer Institute and Hospital; Lijia Ma, Qibin Li, Jun Wang of Beijing Genomics Institute and Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Pingping Zheng, Juanbin Zhang, Ruiqiang Li of Beijing Genomics Institute; Xiaoying Li, Guang Ning of Department of Endocrine and Metabolic Diseases, Ruijin Hospital Affiliated to The Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine.
This work was supported by grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China (no. 30225037, 30471991, 30570731), the 973and 863 Program of China (no. 2006CB503909, 2004CB518603), the “111” Project, and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (no. BK2004082, BK2006714) (to C.-Y.Z, K. Zen, J. Zhang, J Wang).
Chen et al.: "Serum MicroRNAs: a Novel Class of Biomarkers for Cancer Diagnosis and other diseases." Publishing in Cell Research Vol 18, No 10, 2008.
Author contact:
Chen-Yu Zhang (Nanjing University, Jiangsu, China)
Tel: +86 25 8368 6234; E-mail: cyzhang@nju.edu.cn
Editorial contact:
Dangsheng Li (Cell Research, Shanghai, China)
Tel: +86 21 5492 2951; E-mail: dsli@sibs.ac.cn
Media contacts:
Katherine Anderson (Nature New York)
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Ruth Francis (Nature London)
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