Can miRNA profiling allow us to determine which patients with esophageal cancer will respond to chemoradiotherapy?

Abstract

Most patients undergoing surgery for esophageal cancer are treated before surgery with chemotherapy and radiotherapy. However, some tumors respond poorly to these treatments. Ko and colleagues profiled microRNA levels in esophageal cancers from patients who did vs. did not respond to chemoradiotherapy. A large number of microRNAs were differentially expressed between responders vs. non-responders, and patients with either decreased miR-135b or increased miR-145 expression in cancer tissue had improved disease free survival. Although this study has several limitations, including a mixed cohort of patients with adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma, and the absence of a validation set of patients, the results do suggest that a microRNA profiling approach may be able to circumvent one of the primary challenges for biomarker development, molecular heterogeneity. Word count = 124Title: concise, not more than 120 characters.Can microRNA profiling allow us to determine which patients with esophageal cancer will respond to chemoradiotherapy?Keywords: approximately 5-10 keywords for the review.

Identification of miRNAs and genes for predicting Barrett’s esophagus progressing to esophageal adenocarcinoma using miRNA-mRNA integrated analysis

“…Compared with normal samples, 21 significant DEMs were identified. Among them, hsa-miR-147e [ 46 ], hsa-miR-181d [ 47 ], hsa-miR-214 [ 48 , 49 ], hsa-miR-612 [ 50 ], hsa-miR-133b [ 51 ], hsa-miR-143 [ 52 – 55 ], hsa-miR-100 [ 56 ], hsa-miR-126* [ 57 ], hsa-miR-145 [ 52 , 58 – 60 ], hsa-miR-15b [ 61 ] were all reported in EC. Most importantly, hsa-miR-496, hsa-miR-214, hsa-miR-15b were found to be correlated with patient survival.…”