Blood 'fingerprints' can serve as biomarkers for cancer, diabetes
Washington, Sept 4 : In a revolutionary discovery, scientists have found that Serum
microRNAs (miRNAs) in the blood can act as efficient 'fingerprints' for detecting diseases
including cancer and diabetes, says a new research.
miRNAs are a class of naturally occurring small non-coding RNAs that have been linked
with cancer development.
The finding can pave the way for an innovative non-invasive diagnostic tool.
According to recent studies, individual miRNAs as diagnostic biomarkers of specific
cancers could not do away with the chances that these miRNAs appeared as a result of
contamination.
Chen-Yu Zhang and colleagues are the first to comprehensively characterize entire blood
miRNA profiles of healthy subjects and patients with lung cancer, colorectal cancer and
diabetes, ruling out contamination.
They suggested that the specific serum miRNA expression profiles they identified make
up for 'fingerprints' for cancer and disease.
While tumour markers do improve diagnosis to a large extent, current diagnostic
techniques are prohibitively invasive and thus have limited clinical application.
The new approach is non-invasive and has the potential to transform the clinical
management of various cancers and diseases through improving disease diagnosis, cancer
classification, prognosis estimation, prediction of therapeutic efficacy, maintenance of
surveillance following surgery, and the ability to forecast disease recurrence.
The technique will also be useful to pharmacological companies in identifying
population subgroups who are responsive to drugs that have failed in phase III clinical
trials.
The study is published online this week in Cell Research.
ENDS NV
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--ANI
