The Diagnostic Utility of Tumor Suppressor or Oncogenic Small Biomarkers in Association with LncRNA in Breast Cancer

Abstract

Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of death for women globally, according to the WHO, the number of cancer cases expected in 2025 will be 19.3 million cases. In Egypt, cancer is an increasing problem and especially BC (Siegel et al., 2019). BC is the most common female malignant tumor, a major threat to women’s health and its development is considerably aggressive local invasion, early metastases, and multidrug resistance to chemotherapy (Siegel et al., 2019). Therefore, developments of minimally invasive markers for early detection of breast cancer are of great interest. TCGA revealed that many of the mutations and copy number changes found in cancer do not overlap with protein coding genes. Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) and microRNAs (miRNAs) were among the first non-coding RNAs to be investigated in cancer, along with their roles as therapeutic targets or biomarkers. 70 female patients early diagnosed with BC aged from 29 to 82 years old (mean 50.01 ± 1.46) from the Clinical Oncology Department, National Cancer Institute, Cairo University, Egypt. In addition to 25 healthy volunteers without history of any tumor or breast disease and matched with patients regarding age to be enrolled in this case control study. Serum samples were withdrawn at diagnosis for serological markers (CEA and CA15-3) and molecular non-coding RNA markers (LINC00511, miR-185-3p and miR-301a-3p), together with clinical diagnosis data. In this study, median serum levels of CEA and CA15-3 were increased in BC patients than in healthy controls by 1.7-fold (P-value =0.155) and 3.5-fold (P-value <0.0001) respectively. The corresponding area under the ROC curve (AUC) for CEA and CA15-3 was 0.759 and 0.81, with P-value = 0.01 and 0.00 respectively. The cutoff values were 1.66 ng/mL and 17.2 U/mL for CEA and Ca15-3 respectively, with a sensitivity of 76.47%, 60.00% and a specificity of 90.0%, 100% respectively (Table 18). Our study, therefore, suggested that the combination of CA15-3 + CEA did not achieve a better diagnostic performance in the BC patients