Screening of autoantibodies as biomarkers in the serum of renal cancer patients based on human proteome microarray.

The autoantibody in patients' serum can act as a biomarker for diagnosing cancer, and the differences in autoantibodies are significantly correlated with the changes in their target proteins. In this study, 16 renal cancer (RC) patients were assigned to the disease group, and 16 healthy people were assigned to the healthy control (HC) group. The human proteome microarray consisting of>19,500 proteins was used to examine the differences in IgG and IgM autoantibodies in sera between RC and HC. The comparative analysis of the microarray results shows that 101 types of IgG and 25 types of IgM autoantibodies are significantly higher in RC than in HC. Highly responsive autoantibodies can be candidate biomarkers (e.g., anti-KCNAB2 IgG and anti-RCN1 IgM). Extensive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) was performed to screen sera in 72 RC patients and 66 healthy volunteers to verify the effectiveness of the new autoantibodies. The AUCs of anti-KCNAB2 IgG and anti-GAPDH IgG were 0.833 and 0.753, respectively. KCNAB2 achieves high protein expression, and its high mRNA level is confirmed to be an unfavorable prognostic marker in clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) tissues. This study suggests that the high-throughput human proteome microarray can effectively screen autoantibodies in serum as candidate biomarkers, and their corresponding target proteins can lay a basis for the in-depth investigation into renal cancer.

Apolipoprotein E Epsilon 4 Enhances the Association between the rs2910164 Polymorphism of miR-146a and Risk of Atherosclerotic Cerebral Infarction.

AIM: To analyse the relationship between two potentially functional single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of the miR-146a gene (rs2910164 and rs57095329) and the risk of atherosclerotic cerebral infarction (ACI). METHODS: A total of 297 patients with ACI and 300 matched healthy individuals were enrolled in the study. The miR-146a polymorphism was detected using the polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism method. RESULTS: A significant difference in the C allele frequency at rs2910164 (p=0.028) was noted between patients with ACI and control subjects. In contrast, the genotype and allele frequencies of rs57095329 were not statistically associated with ACI. In addition, the decreased expression of miR-146a was significantly more frequent in ACI patients who were ApoEε4 (＋) carriers (p=0.0233), and rs2910164 G＞C was intimately associated with the ApoEε4-containing genotype in patients compared with the ApoEε4 (－) carriers (p=0.0323). CONCLUSIONS: Our findings indicated that the C allele of rs2910164 miR-146a is an important risk factor for ACI, and ApoEε4 may function through attenuating miR-146a expression to enhance ACI susceptibility. This study provides new information about the possible relationship between miR-146a and ApoEε4 in the development of ACI, with potentially important therapeutic implications.