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MicroRNA-21 in lung cancer: overexpression in metastasis of pulmonary adenocarcinomas and squamous cell carcinomas
BMC Proceedings volume 4, Article number: P14 (2010)
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of naturally occurring small non-coding RNAs that target protein-coding mRNAs at the post-transcriptional level. Expression profiling has identified miRNA signatures in cancers that associate with diagnosis, staging, progression, prognosis, and response to treatment. MiRNAs are ideal biomarkers in FFPE-tissue because, unlike mRNA, miRNA integrity is affected very little by formalin fixation. Previous studies have shown that miR-21 overexpression correlated with poor prognosis in NSCLC patients.
In this study we investigated the expression of mir-21 in primary carcinoma and metastasis and near non-tumor parenchyma.
FFPE samples from surgical specimens and biopsies of 7 pulmonary adenocarcinomas and 5 squamous cell carcinomas and respective metastasis together with normal lung tissue from the same case; these areas were separated by laser-capture microdissection prior to miRNA analysis.
The expression level of miR-21 by qRT-PCR was significantly higher in tumor tissues than in adjacent normal tissues (p = 0.005). The overexpression in the metastasis samples compared to adjacent normal tissue was almost satistically significant (p = 0.051).
MiR-21 was overexpressed in tumor tissues relative to adjacent non-tumor tissues. We found an increase in miR-21 expression in primary carcinoma and metastasis in pulmonary adenocarcinomas when compared with miR-21 lower expression in squamous cell carcinoma. Despite the small sample studied, further investigation may indicate therapeutic and prognostic relevance of this determination, previous studies suggest that miR-21 and has a role in tumor growth, invasion and metastasis by targeting multiple suppressor genes [1]. Therefore, suppression of miR-21 may provide a novel approach for the treatment of advanced cancers through regulation of tumour suppressor genes.
References
Zhu S, Wu H, Wu F, Nie D, Sheng S, Mo YY: MicroRNA-21 targets tumor suppressor genes in invasion and metastasis. Cell Res. 2008, 18: 350-359. 10.1038/cr.2008.24.
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Open Access This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Silva, M.R., Santos, P., Velada, I. et al. MicroRNA-21 in lung cancer: overexpression in metastasis of pulmonary adenocarcinomas and squamous cell carcinomas. BMC Proc 4 (Suppl 2), P14 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1186/1753-6561-4-S2-P14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1753-6561-4-S2-P14