The role of tumor markers in the early detection of cancer

Investigation of serum markers of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma based on machine learning methods

Esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) is one of the malignant tumors with high mortality in humans, and there is a lack of effective and convenient early diagnosis methods. By analyzing the serum miRNA expression data in ESCC tumor samples and normal samples, on the basis of the max-relevance and min-redundancy (mRMR) feature selection and the incremental feature selection (IFS) method, a random forest classifier constructed by 5 feature miRNAs was acquired in our study. The receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve showed that the model was able to distinguish samples. Principal component analysis (PCA) and sample hierarchical cluster analysis showed that 5 feature miRNAs could well distinguish ESCC patients from healthy individuals. The expression levels of miR-663a, miR-5100 and miR-221-3p all showed a higher expression level in ESCC patients than those in healthy individuals. On the contrary, miR-6763-5p and miR-7111-5p both showed lower expression levels in ESCC patients than those in healthy individuals. In addition, the collected clinical serum samples were used for qRT-PCR analysis. It was uncovered that the expression trends of the 5 feature miRNAs followed a similar pattern with those in the training set. The above findings indicated that the 5 feature miRNAs may be serum tumor markers of ESCC. This study offers new insights for the early diagnosis of ESCC.

Circular RNA circCCDC66 Contributes to Malignant Phenotype of Osteosarcoma by Sponging miR-338-3p to Upregulate the Expression of PTP1B

In recent years, the mechanism of cancer research has become hotspots of life science and medicine, especially due to the rapid development of molecular medicine and bioinformatics research. Similarly, the molecular mechanism also has received increasing attention in osteosarcoma (OS) research. Also, a considerable amount of research confirmed that circular RNAs (circRNAs) could regulate cancer cell growth and metastasis. This study aimed to explore the effect of a circRNA, circCCDC66, on OS and reveal its potential molecular mechanism. High circCCDC66 expression level was found in OS patient-derived tissue samples and OS cell lines by qRT-PCR. The abilities cell proliferation and metastatic of U2OS and SW1353 cells were then assessed by Cell Counting Kit-8 and transwell assay, respectively. The interaction between circCCDC66 and its target miRNAs were verified by the dual-luciferase reporter assay. Through functional experiments, we found that circCCDC66 knockdown promoted the inhibition of cell proliferation and metastatic of OS cell lines. From mechanistic perspective, circCCDC66 upregulated PTP1B by sponging miR-338-3p. Collectively, our findings demonstrated that circCCDC66 contributed to malignant behaviors of OS cells by miR-338-3p/PTP1B pathway, which suggested circCCDC66/miR-338-3p/PTP1B axis might be a potential therapeutic target.