MIR-15B AS Circulating Biomarkers For Diagnosis OF Malignant Melonoma

Circulating microRNAs in serum and other body fluids, as a valuable source of cellular data, also canserve as cancer diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers. Therefore, finding biomarkers for early andnon-invasive diagnosis of malignant cancers such as melanoma can affect in tumor therapy. In thisstudy we investigated the expression of 7 microRNAs in the serum of patients with melanoma. Theseven microRNAs that regulate EMT phase in melanoma were chosen based on searching onmiRTarBase, miRWalk, and miRCancer databases. The expression level of selected MicroRNAs wasquantified by Real-time PCR in serum of 10 melanoma pateints and 6 normal donors. The expressionlevel of each microRNA was normalized against U6 snRNA expression and was calculated using the2-ΔCT method. Among the seven selected microRNAs (miR-205, miR-141, miR-203, miR-15b, miR-22, miR-9, miR-155), the miR-15b (fold change= 1.6, p value = 0.05) was significantly up-regulatedand miR-155 (fold change= 2.8, p value = 0.002) was down-regulated in patients with melanomacompared to control group samples. The most of patients was in stage II with metastatic to dermallymph nodes. The data presented at this study suggested that the high level of miR-15b (astargeting for CDK4 and SMAD3) together with low level of miR-155 (its target ZEB1) might serve asnovel biomarkers in the non invasive diagnosis of malignant melanoma, although more studies areneeded to confirm our findings. Support: This work was supported by grants funded by RoyanInstitute