Abstract 4960: Circulating miRNAs as noninvasive biomarkers in esophageal adenocarcinoma patients

Esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC) is one of the most rapidly increasing cancers in the United States and throughout the developed world. The current primary screening method for EAC is gastrointestinal endoscopy (EGD), and this method is unsuitable and impractical for population-based screening or detection of asymptomatic EAC. Moreover, thus far, only a few reports have described altered miR expression in EAC, none of which were carried out in serum or plasma. We discovered a panel of noninvasive circulating microRNA (miR) biomarkers to promote earlier detection of EAC. We extracted total RNA from serum of each subject and hybridized it to fixed-probe miR microarrays in 12 sera each from EAC patients, subjects with normal EGDs, and 12 matched EAC tissues and normal esophageal tissues from EAC patients. Data was extracted and normalized using Feature Extraction Software 9.3 and GeneSpring software (Agilent) and subsequently analyzed by classification trees, multiple leave-one-out cross-validation, and relative influence plots. We selected the most influential miRs for validation by quantitative RT-PCR assays. Our preliminary miR findings indicate that several miRs show dramatic and significant differences in serum levels between EAC and normal control subjects. An ROC curve assembled based on aggregate data yielded an area under the curve (AUC) = 0.885, with sensitivity = 92% and specificity = 83%. We conclude that a panel consisting of several miRs is likely to discriminate asymptomatic EAC patients from normal subjects, leading to earlier diagnosis and improved prognosis. Citation Format: {Authors}. {Abstract title} [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 102nd Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2011 Apr 2-6; Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2011;71(8 Suppl):Abstract nr 4960. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2011-4960