King of the elements?

Abstract

The hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common malignant tumors and carries a poor survival rate. Prognosis, survival and management of patients at risk for developing HCC remain challenging in Egypt and worldwide. Furthermore, poor prognosis of patients with symptomatic (HCC) diagnosed clinically at advanced stages suggests an urgent need for new biomarkers detection that can be used for pre-clinical screening for early detection of premalignant lesions and tumors in high risk to In the present study we used novel formulated anticancer compound(s), combined with or without Sorafenib treatment to exert their antiproliferative effects by eliciting concomitant expression of known or novel biomarkers, including different serum miRNAs, which can be quantitatively analyzed for differences in the levels of metabolites and proteins in the blood and liver tissues of treated HCC xenografts and liver cirrhosis animal models. In addition, circulating miRNAs levels were measured as promising markers in 12 month interval-serum samples that were collected from normal, chronic hepatitis C virus infected patient cohorts at the pre-malignant or pre-clinical stages and liver cirrhotic patients that did not develop cancer. Different serum miRNAs, including miR-21, miR-142, let-7a, let-7b, miR-429 and miR-34a were detected in preclinical HCC patients and have the potential to screen for hepatitis C virus infected patients at high risk to develop HCC 12 months after miRNAs detection. Our data of detected serum miRNAs from animal models and patient samples can be used to confirm and correlate histological and histochemical results at various time points with serum or imaging biomarkers, which may have a great promise for the prediction and prevention of HCC in high risk Egyptian populations.