Disregulation of miR-216a and miR-217 in Gastric Cancer and Their Clinical Significance.

OBJECTIVE: The majority of gastric cancer (GC) diagnoses occur at the middle or late stage of the disease, indicating that finding novel biomarkers that could be detectable at earlier stage is urgently needed. Accumulating studies have shown that microRNAs, a class of tiny single-stranded RNAs, play important roles in multiple biological processes including cancer development. The present study aimed to evaluate the effect of miR-216a and miR-217 in GC. MATERIAL AND METHODS: The real-time quantitative reverse-transcription PCR was exploited to identify and compare the expression levels of miR-216a and miR-217 in 37 pairs of samples of gastric cancer tissue and adjacent normal tissue. Superimposed on this, the potential relationship between miR-216a/217 levels and clinicopathological parameters in patients suffering GC was explored. RESULTS: The results obtained from this study showed that the miR-216a is significantly upregulated in gastric cancer tissues, compared with adjacent normal tissues, but the altered expression of miR-217 was not significant. For miR-216a/217, no significant correlations were detected between expression levels of these miRNAs and clinical and pathological characteristics of patients. CONCLUSION: This prospective study proposes that upregulation of miR-216a might represent an important mechanism for the development of gastric cancer.

Study of cofilin 1 gene expression in colorectal cancer.

BACKGROUND: Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most prevalent malignancies worldwide. Cofilin is a key regulatory protein in the dynamics of actin filaments. Previous studies have shown cofilin 1's major role in cell migration process and its role in tumor cell migration and invasion. Therefore, cofilin 1 may have the potential as a novel diagnostic tumor marker in various cancers. In this study, differential expression of CFL1 in CRC tissues in comparison with adjacent non-tumor tissues was investigated and the diagnostic value of this protein in CRC was evaluated. METHODS: Synthesized cDNA from extracted RNAs of 30 patients were subjected to qRT-PCR to quantify relative expression of cofilin 1. The relationship between cofilin 1 expression and clinicopathological features of patients were studied too. RESULTS: The study showed significant upregulation of cofilin 1 in CRC tissue samples compared to adjacent non-tumor tissue samples (P<0.05). The receiver operating characteristic curve analysis showed higher area under the curve (0.85). There was no significant correlation between cofilin 1 expression levels and clinicopathological features of patients. CONCLUSIONS: According to the obtained results, cofilin 1 can serve as a candidate for clinically useful diagnostic biomarker or therapeutic target for CRC.

Expression of miR-520c in intestinal type gastric adenocarcinoma.

BACKGROUND: MicroRNAs are small non-coding RNAs that participate in post-transcriptional gene regulation in cells thereby playing active role in pathological conditions and have been nominated as new class of biomarkers in disease including cancer. miR-520c has been reported as potential oncogenic micro-RNA in several previous studies. Gastric cancer is the most common cancer of digestive tract and the fourth prevalent cancer worldwide with the intestinal-type gastric adenocarcinoma (IGA) the dominant type of gastric malignancies. This study aimed to explore miR-520c putative role, in IGA and patient's clinicopathological features. METHODS: Total RNA was first extracted from 42 pairs of IGA tissues and relevant non-tumorous adjacent tissues. cDNA was synthesized from extracted RNAs using specific primers for miR-520c. The level of miR-520c was quantified using SYBER Green Real-Time PCR master mix. The relationship between miR-520c expression and clinicopathological features were examined. RESULTS: Our study resulted in no differential expression of miR-520c in IGA. There was no significant correlation between miR-520c expression and clinicopathological features including tumor grade, genus and age groups. CONCLUSIONS: To our knowledge, this is the first report about exploring miR-520c expression in IGA tissue samples. Our results do not verify miR-520c previously established oncogenic role in IGA.