miRNAs in Sera of Tunisian patients discriminate between inflammatory breast cancer and non-inflammatory breast cancer

In recent years, circulating miRNAs have attracted interest as stable, non-invasive biomarkers for various pathological conditions. Here, we investigated their potential to serve as minimally invasive, early detection markers for inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) and non-inflammatory breast cancer (non-IBC) in serum. miRNA profiling was performed on serum from 20 patients with non-IBC, 20 with IBC, and 20 normal control subjects. Real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) was applied to measure the level of 12 candidate miRNAs previously identified in other research(miR-342-5p, miR-342--3p, miR-320, miR-30b, miR-29a, miR-24, miR-15a, miR-548d-5p, miR-486-3p, miR-451, miR-337-5p, miR-335).We found that 4 miRNAs (miR-24, miR-342-3p, miR-337-5p and miR-451) were differentially expressed in serum of IBC patients compared to non-IBC, and 3 miRNAs (miR-337-5p ,miR-451and miR-30b) were differentially expressed in IBC and non-IBC patients combined compared to healthy controls. miR-24, miR-342-3p, miR-337-5p and miR-451 were found to be significantly down-regulated in IBC patients compared to non-IBC. Likewise, the expression level of mir-451 showed significant down-regulation in IBC serum, while mir-30b and miR-337-5p were up-regulated in non-IBC serum comparatively to normal controls. Using receiver operational curve (ROC) analysis, we show that dysregulated miRNAs can discriminate patients with IBC and non-IBC from healthy controls with sensitivity ranging from 76 to 81% and specificity from 66 to 80%, for three separate miRNAs. In conclusion, our data suggest that circulating miRNAs are potential biomarkers for classifying IBC and non-IBC, and may also be candidates for early detection of breast cancer.