Salivary microRNA shows promise in detecting HCC
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Molecules in saliva may be highly sensitive and specific noninvasive biomarkers of hepatocellular carcinoma, according to a study published in PeerJ.
“As liver cancers increase, better tools are needed to detect these cancers early to improve survival,” Daniel Rotroff, PhD, MSPH, senior author of the study and researcher in the department of quantitative health sciences at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute, told Healio. “We believe this study represents an important step demonstrating that molecules in saliva may serve as promising, noninvasive indicators for the presence of liver cancer. We hope with continued work in this area, that someday patients may be able to be tested for liver cancer by simply mailing a saliva sample from the comfort of their home.”
Rotroff worked with lead author Arshiya Mariam, also of the Cleveland Clinic, and colleagues to perform small RNA sequencing in 20 adult patients with HCC and 19 with cirrhosis, all of whom underwent LT for HCC, surgical resection for liver tumors or liver biopsy. Twelve patients had HCC patients with chronic liver disease, and investigators analyzed those combined samples and stratified them by the presence of chronic liver disease.
Rotroff and colleagues compared differential expression of salivary microRNAs (miRNAs) with a previously published report of miRNAs in liver tissues of patients with HCC vs. cirrhosis and performed leave-one-out cross-validation and support vector machine models to determine if salivary miRNAs could potentially detect HCC. They adjusted P values for multiple comparisons using a false discovery rate (FDR) approach and miRNA with FDR P < 0.05 were considered statistically significant.
Researchers detected 4,565 precursor and mature miRNAs in saliva, of which 365 were significantly different between patients with HCC compared with cirrhosis (FDR P < 0.05), and noted that 283 miRNAs were significantly downregulated among patients with HCC. A combination of 10 miRNAs and covariates, which accurately classified patients with HCC, were identified with machine-learning models, as well as three miRNAs that were expressed in HCC saliva samples and in a previously published study in HCC tissue compared with cirrhotic liver tissue.
“Overall, this study provides the first evidence that salivary miRNAs may serve as useful,
noninvasive biomarkers for HCC,” Rotroff and colleagues wrote. “In addition, many of the identified miRNAs in saliva are concordant with previous findings of miRNAs in both plasma from HCC patients and HCC tissue. Future work should consider whether salivary miRNAs can help to improve detection of HCC either alone or in combination of other non-invasive biospecimens.”
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