Disregulation of miR-216a and miR-217 in Gastric Cancer and Their Clinical Significance.

Abstract

The majority of gastric cancer (GC) diagnoses occur at the middle or late stage of the disease, indicating that finding novel biomarkers that could be detectable at earlier stage is urgently needed. Accumulating studies have shown that microRNAs, a class of tiny single-stranded RNAs, play important roles in multiple biological processes including cancer development. The present study aimed to evaluate the effect of miR-216a and miR-217 in GC.The real-time quantitative reverse-transcription PCR was exploited to identify and compare the expression levels of miR-216a and miR-217 in 37 pairs of samples of gastric cancer tissue and adjacent normal tissue. Superimposed on this, the potential relationship between miR-216a/217 levels and clinicopathological parameters in patients suffering GC was explored.The results obtained from this study showed that the miR-216a is significantly upregulated in gastric cancer tissues, compared with adjacent normal tissues, but the altered expression of miR-217 was not significant. For miR-216a/217, no significant correlations were detected between expression levels of these miRNAs and clinical and pathological characteristics of patients.This prospective study proposes that upregulation of miR-216a might represent an important mechanism for the development of gastric cancer.