Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

1-1-2012

Journal

Journal of Cancer

Volume

3

Inclusive Pages

432-448

DOI

10.7150/jca.4919

Abstract

Considerable attention and an enormous amount of resources have been dedicated to cancer biomarker discovery and validation. However, there are still a limited number of useful biomarkers available for clinical use. An ideal biomarker should be easily assayed with minimally invasive medical procedures but possess high sensitivity and specificity. Commonly used circulating biomarkers are proteins in serum, most of which require labor-intensive analysis hindered by low sensitivity in early tumor detection. Since the deregulation of microRNA (miRNA) is associated with cancer development and progression, profiling of circulating miRNAs has been used in a number of studies to identify novel minimally invasive miRNA biomarkers. In this review, we discuss the origin of the circulating cell-free miRNAs and their carriers in blood. We summarize the clinical use and function of potentially promising miRNA biomarkers in a variety of different cancers, along with their downstream target genes in tumor initiation and development. Additionally, we analyze some technical challenges in applying miRNA biomarkers to clinical practice.

Comments

Reproduced with permission of Ivyspring International Publisher. Journal of Cancer.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Peer Reviewed

1

Open Access

1

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