micro-RNA 451-a as a Circulating Biomarker for Neuroblastoma.

Abstract

Introduction: Micro ribonucleic acids (miRNAs) are small non-coding RNAs that modulate the expression of various genes. They have an important role in cancer pathogenesis. Differential expression of multiple miRNAs have been used as potential diagnostic and prognostic markers.

Methods: Various cancers have lately been employed as therapeutic targets. This prospective study included untreated pediatric neuroblastoma (NB) patients. In the discovery phase, global miRNA profiling was done using next-generation sequencing (NGS) on biopsy tissue samples of NB patients. In this phase, the top expressing miRNA was identified and chosen for further validation as circulating miRNA in blood samples of a different set of NB patients by real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR).

Results: Based on the read counts on the global miRNA profiling in the discovery phase, we found that the miRNA that consistently had high reads across the majority of the NB samples were miRNA 451-a, 19b-3p, 106b-5p, and 21-5p. Of these, we selected miRNA 451-a and 19-b for the validation phase of the study as they had consistent overexpression. In the validation phase, the expression of the circulating miRNA 451-a in the blood was found to be higher. The average value for the relative fold (RF) expression for miRNA 451-a was 1.52.

Conclusion: miRNA 451-a is overexpressed both in the cancer tissue and the blood of NB patients. It can serve as a potential diagnostic marker. Further studies can elucidate its role in the pathogenesis of NB and it can have utility as a therapeutic target.