Circulating MicroRNA 29a: An Evolving Biomarker for Diagnosis of Pulmonary Tuberculosis

Introduction: Tuberculosis (TB) is global health problem threatening millions every year. There is urgent need of effective biomarkers for its diagnostics and circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) have recently emerged as novel and non-invasive molecular markers in blood. Aim: This study was done to evaluate serum miRNAs as a potential biomarker for the diagnosis of pulmonary mycobacterium tuberculosis infection. Materials and Methods: In this prospective cross-sectional study, acute pulmonary TB patients were recruited based on positive Mycobacterium tuberculosis Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) in sputum samples and Microarray expression profiling was performed on blood of these patients to study differentially expressed miRNAs. The results were validated by Real-Time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) on pulmonary TB cases and healthy controls. Student’s t-tests and analysis variance tests were used for statistical analysis. The p-value <0.05 was considered statistically significant. Results: Results of microarray expression profiling showed 75 differentially expressed miRNAs in cases of pulmonary TB; among these 5 upregulated and 2 downregulated miRNAs were evaluated by RT-PCR. miRNA 29a exhibited good distinguishing efficiency; followed by miRNA 384. ROC plot of expression data for miRNA in cases and control groups showed that AUC of miRNA-29a was 0.8268 (sensitivity=80%, specificity=82%) . Conclusion: This study suggests that altered levels of serum miRNAs have great potential to serve as non-invasive biomarkers for detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosisinfection. miRNA-29a can be used as an effective biomarker for diagnosis of pulmonary TB.

Noncoding RNA (ncRNA) Profile Association with Patient Outcome in Epithelial Ovarian Cancer Cases

Ovarian cancer (OC) is the second most frequent type of gynecological cancers worldwide. In the past decades, the development of novel diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers available for OC has been limited, reflecting by the lack of specificity of such markers or very costly management. Microarray expression profiling has shown very effective results in exploring new molecular markers for patients with OC. Nonetheless, most screenings are focused on mutations or expression of molecules that are translated into proteins, corresponding to only 2% of the total human genome. In order to account for the vast majority of transcripts, in the present exploratory study, we assessed the expression levels of a comprehensive panel of noncoding RNA in different subtypes of OC. We further evaluated their association with patient overall survival (OS) and aggressive forms of the disease, such as tumor type, stage, and chemotherapy resistance. By microarray profiling in a total of 197 epithelial OC patients (162 serous carcinomas, 15 endometrioid carcinomas, 11 mucinous carcinomas, and 9 clear cell carcinomas), we found two candidates, SNORA68 and SNORD74, which associated with OS and poor clinicopathological features. The overexpression of those two targets combined was correlated with shorter OS and progression-free survival. That association was further observed to correlate with a more aggressive form of the disease. Overall, the results indicate that a panel comprised of SNORA68 and SNORD74 may be clinically relevant, where patients could be offered a more individualized, targeted follow-up, given its further validation on future prospective clinical studies.