Identification of a serum 48-lncRNA signature as diagnostic marker for hepatocellular carcinoma and liver cirrhosis

ABSTRACT: In cancer management, early and accurate diagnosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is important for enhancing survival rate of patients. Currently, serum alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) is the only one biomarker for detection of HCC. However, serum AFP is not satisfactory for diagnosis of HCC due to its low accuracy (about 60-70%). In this study, we collected 109 serum samples (discovery set) from healthy control (HC) and patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB), liver cirrhosis (LC) and HCC, and analyzed them with custom lncRNA microarray. Profiling analysis shows 181 differentially expressed lncRNAs between HCs and patients with CHB, LC and HCC. Then a 48-lncRNA diagnostic signature was identified with 100% predictive accuracy for all subjects in the discovery set. This diagnostic signature was verified with a cross-validation analysis in the discovery set. To further corroborate the signature, we gathered another 66 serum samples (validation set) and also analyzed them with microarray. The result indicates that the same signature has similar diagnostic accuracy for HC (100%), CHB (73%), LC (88%) and HCC (95%), implying a reproducible diagnostic biomarker for HCC. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis exhibits that this signature has significantly higher diagnostic accuracy for HCC and non-cancerous subjects (area under curve [AUC]: 0.994) than AFP (AUC: 0.773) in the discovery set and this was also verified in the validation set (0.964 vs 0.792). More importantly, the signature detected small HCC (<3cm) with 100% (13/13) accuracy while AFP with only 61.5% (8/13). Altogether, this study demonstrates that the serum 48-lncRNA signature is not only a powerful and sensitive biomarker for diagnosis of HCC but also a potential biomarker for LC. ***************************************************************** Submitter declares these data are subject to patent number ZL 2016 1 0397094. *****************************************************************

ORGANISM(S): Homo sapiens

PROVIDER: GSE78160 | GEO | 2022/10/15

SECONDARY ACCESSION(S): PRJNA312922

REPOSITORIES: GEO