The expression and clinical significance of serum miR-205 for breast cancer and its role in detection of human cancers.

OBJECTIVE Our study aims to measure the expression level of serum microRNA-205 (miRNA-205, miR-205) in breast cancer, and evaluate the diagnostic value of miR-205 as a noninvasive biomarker for the early detection of breast cancer and other human cancers through a meta-analysis. METHODS In the first phase, an experiment based on 58 breast cancer patients and 93 healthy controls was carried out to figure out the diagnostic performance of serum miR-205 for breast cancer. The study was conducted by using Reverse Transcription and quantitative Real-time polymerase Cycle Reaction (RT-qPCR). In the second phase, a meta-analysis was performed to evaluate the diagnostic value of miR-205 for various cancers. RESULTS The test showed that the normalized expression levels of miR-205 in serum were evidently higher in healthy control than in breast cancer with a sensitivity and specificity at the optimal cutoff of 86.2% and 82.8%, respectively. The meta-analysis received a sensitivity of 75% and a specificity of 84%, and an AUC of 0.87. CONCLUSION Our study determined that as a noninvasive and accessible biomarker, miR-205 not only has high clinical diagnostic value in the detection of breast cancer, but also plays an important role in clinical utilization of diagnosing various cancers. Further researches based on larger-scale subjects and additional improvement should be carried out to confirm our results.