Читать книгу Genomic and Epigenomic Biomarkers of Toxicology and Disease - Группа авторов - Страница 69

In view of the high degree of malignancy and difficult treatment of MM, early screening is particularly important in the prevention and treatment of the disease. At present, there have been studies designed to improve the detection rate of early MM patients by identifying the expression level of specific miRNAs in serum or plasma (Mujoomdar et al. 2010).

Santarelli et al. (2011) found that miR-126 is downregulated in the tissues of MM patients. They noticed that one of the target genes of miR-126 is vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), which encodes a protein that stimulates angiogenesis and increases the VEGF content in the serum of MM patients. In addition, miR-126 expression is downregulated and VEGF expression is upregulated in lung cancer patients, which suggests that miR-126 plays a role in tumor inhibition (Liu et al. 2009). Moreover, there is a correlation between miR-126 and the serum MM-specific marker soluble mesothelin-related protein (SMRP); and the level of SMRP is related to the high risk of MM development. These kinds of evidence indicate that the correlation between miR-126 and SMRP can be used as an early detection marker of MM (Santarelli et al. 2015). Further research on serum samples from forty-five untreated MM and twenty non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients showed that the circulating miR-126 level in MM patients decreased and could be significantly different from the level in non-small cell lung cancer and in healthy control group samples. Although miR-126 can be considered as a marker of MM, it lacks tumor specificity owing to its low expression in various tumors, which indicates that miR-126 will be used only to bind to other MM-specific biomarkers such as mesothelin (Tomasetti et al. 2012).

Weber et al. (2014) verified the expression level of miR-103 in the plasma of MM patients and of an asbestos-exposed control population, with sensitivity and specificity of 85% and 63% respectively. However, when combined with mesothelitin, sensitivity reached 95% and specificity reached 81%.

Therefore miRNA can be used as a biomarker in the early detection of MM, especially in combination with other specific protein markers. It can also be used as a serum-monitoring indicator for asbestos-exposed population.