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Research Paper|Volume 9, Issue 6|pp 1565—1584

Identification of an 88-microRNA signature in whole blood for diagnosis of hepatocellular carcinoma and other chronic liver diseases

Xiao-Ran Long1,2, Yao-Jun Zhang3, Mei-Yin Zhang1,2, Keng Chen4, X.F Steven Zheng1,2,5, Hui-Yun Wang1,2
  • 1State Key Laboratory of Oncology in South China, Sun Yat-Sen University Cancer Center, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510060, China
  • 2Collaborative Innovation Center for Cancer Medicine, Sun Yat-Sen University Cancer Center, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510060, China
  • 3Department of Hepatobiliary Oncology, Sun Yat-Sen University Cancer Center, Sun Yat-Sen University Cancer Center, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510060, China
  • 4Department of Liver Disease, Guangzhou Eighth People's Hospital, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510060, China
  • 5Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey and Department of Pharmacology, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA

* * Equal contribution

Received: May 2, 2017Accepted: June 15, 2017Published: June 27, 2017
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.101253

Copyright: © 2017 Long 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

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a common cancer with very poor survival due to lack of reliable biomarker for early diagnosis. In this study, we investigated microRNA (miRNA) profile of whole blood with a custom microarray containing probes for 1849 miRNA species in a total 213 successive subjects who were divided into a discovery set and a validation set. An 88-miRNA signature was established to diagnose health controls (HC), chronic hepatitis B (CHB), liver cirrhosis (LC) and HCC with 100% accuracy in the discovery set using Fisher discriminant analysis. This diagnostic signature was confirmed in the validation set with accuracy rates of 100%, 95.2%, 93.7% and 98.4% for HC, CHB, LC and HCC patients, respectively. Compared with AFP, the only available non-invasive and routinely used biomarker for diagnosis of HCC, the 88-miRNA signature has much higher accuracy (99.5% vs 76.5%), sensitivity (100% vs 63.8%), and specificity (99.2% vs 84.2%). More importantly, the signature detects small HCCs (<3cm) with 100% (17/17) accuracy while AFP has only 64.7% (11/17). In conclusion, we have identified a powerful and sensitive blood 88-miRNA signature for diagnosing early HCC and other chronic liver diseases (CHB and LC) with a high accuracy.