A Three-microRNA Panel in Serum: Serving as a Potential Diagnostic Biomarker for Renal Cell Carcinoma

Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) accounts for about 120,000 death each year. Although surgery is a routine treatment, RCC could be fatal if not diagnosed at an early stage. This study aims to search for suitable serum biomarkers and construct a miRNA panel with high diagnostic sensitivity or specificity.

Totally 146 RCC patients and 150 normal control were involved in this three-stage study. Serum expression levels of 30 miRNAs selected from literature were tested by reverse transcription quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) in the screening stage, the testing stage, and the validation stage. The diagnostic efficiency of miRNAs was evaluated by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and area under curve (AUC) analysis. A panel with the highest diagnostic efficiency was constructed by backward stepwise logistic regression analysis. Additionally, bioinformatics analysis was used to investigate potential biological functions and mechanisms of candidate miRNAs.

MiR-224-5p, miR-34b-3p, miR-129-2-3p and miR-182-5p with low to moderate diagnostic ability (AUC = 0.692, 0.778, 0.687 and 0.745, respectively) were selected as candidate miRNAs after the three-stage study. The final diagnostic panel was consisted by miR-224-5p, miR-34b-3p and miR-182-5p with AUC = 0.855. No significance has been found between these four miRNAs and tumor location, Fuhrman Grade and AJCC clinical stages of RCC. Bioinformatic analysis suggested that the three-miRNAs panel may participate in tumorigenesis of RCC by targeting CORO1C.

The three-miRNA panel in serum could serve as a non-invasive diagnostic biomarker of RCC.