The purpose of this study is to clinically validate a series of circulating miRNAs that distinguish between the 4 most prevalent tumor types (lung cancer (LC); breast cancer (BC); colorectal cancer (CRC); and prostate cancer (PCa)) and healthy donors (HDs). A total of 18 miRNAs and 3 housekeeping miRNA genes were evaluated by qRT-PCR on RNA extracted from serum of cancer patients, 44 LC, 45 BC, 27 CRC, and 40 PCa, and on 45 HDs. The cancer detection performance of the miRNA expression levels was evaluated by studying the area under the curve (AUC) of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves at univariate and multivariate levels. miR-21 was significantly overexpressed in all cancer types compared with HDs, with accuracy of 67.5% (p = 0.001) for all 4 tumor types and of 80.8% (p < 0.0001) when PCa cases were removed from the analysis. For each tumor type, a panel of miRNAs was defined that provided cancer-detection accuracies of 91%, 94%, 89%, and 77%, respectively. In conclusion, we have described a series of circulating miRNAs that define different tumor types with a very high diagnostic performance. These panels of miRNAs would constitute the basis of different approaches of cancer-detection systems for which clinical utility should be validated in prospective cohorts.
7 April 2023 in Clinical and Translational Oncology
Introduction/objectives: To describe abemaciclib use in patients with hormone receptor-positive, human epidermal growth factor receptor-negative (HR+/HER2−) metastatic breast cancer (mBC) who participated in the Named Patient Use program (NPU) in Spain. Material and methods: This retrospective study was based on medical record review of patients across 20 centers during 2018/2019. Patients were followed up until death, enrolment in a clinical trial, loss of follow-up or study end. Clinical and demographic characteristics, treatment patterns and abemaciclib effectiveness were analyzed; time-to-event and median times were estimated using the Kaplan–Meier (KM) method. Results: The study included 69 female patients with mBC (mean age 60.4 ± 12.4 years), 86% of whom had an initial diagnosis of early BC and 20% had an ECOG ≥ 2. Median follow-up was 23 months (range 16–28). Metastases were frequently observed in bone (79%) and visceral tissue (65%), with 47% having metastases in > 2 sites. Median number of treatment lines before abemaciclib was 6 (range 1–10). Abemaciclib monotherapy was received by 72% of patients and combination therapy with endocrine therapy by 28% of patients; 54% of patients required dose adjustments, with a median time to first adjustment of 1.8 months. Abemaciclib was discontinued in 86% of patients after a median of 7.7 months (13.2 months for combination therapy and 7.0 months for monotherapy) mainly due to disease progression (69%). Conclusion: These results suggest that abemaciclib is effective, as monotherapy and in combination, for patients with heavily pretreated mBC, consistent with clinical trial results.