Background: Lung cancer is the major cause of cancer death globally, it is often diagnosed at an advanced stage and has one of the lowest survival rates of any type of cancer. The common interest in the field of lung cancer research is the identification of biomarkers for early diagnosis and accurate prognosis. There is increasing evidence to suggest that microRNAs play important and complex roles in lung cancer. Methods: A meta-analysis was conducted to review the published microRNA expression profiling studies that compared the microRNAs expression profiles in lung cancer tissues with those in normal lung tissues. A vote-counting strategy that considers the total number of studies reporting its differential expression, the total number of tissue samples used in the studies and the average fold change was employed. Results: A total of 184 differentially expressed microRNAs were reported in the fourteen microRNA expression profiling studies that compared lung cancer tissues with normal tissues, with 61 microRNAs were reported in at least two studies. In the panel of consistently reported up-regulated microRNAs, miR-210 was reported in nine studies and miR-21 was reported in seven studies. In the consistently reported down-regulated microRNAs, miR-126 was reported in ten studies and miR-30a was reported in eight studies. Four up-regulated microRNAs (miR-210, miR-21, miR-31 and miR-182) and two down-regulated mcroiRNAs (miR-126 and miR-145) were consistently reported both in squamous carcinoma and adenocarcinoma-based subgroup analysis, with the other 14 microRNAs solely reported in one or the other subset. Conclusions: In conclusion, the top two most consistently reported up-regulated microRNAs were miR-210 and miR-21. The results of this meta-analysis of human lung cancer microRNA expression profiling studies might provide some clues of the potential biomarkers in lung cancer. Further mechanistic and external validation studies are needed for their clinical significance and role in the development of lung cancer.

Lung adenocarcinoma is a heterogernous disease that creates challenges for classification and management. The purpose of this study is to identify specific miRNA markers closely associated with the survival of LUAD patients from a large dataset of significantly altered miRNAs, and to assess the prognostic value of this miRNA expression profile for OS in patients with LUAD.

Background: Palliative gastrectomy for patients with advanced gastric cancer remains controversial. The objective of the present meta-analysis was to analyze survival outcomes and establish a consensus on whether palliative gastrectomy is suitable for patients with incurable advanced gastric cancer and which type of patients should be selected to receive palliative gastrectomy. Methods: A literature search was conducted in PubMed, EMBASE and the Cochrane Library. The results for overall survival in the meta-analysis are expressed as hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Results: Of 1647 articles and abstracts reviewed, 14 studies with 3003 patients were eligible for the final analysis. The meta-analysis revealed that palliative gastrectomy is associated with a significantly improvement in overall survival (HR 0.56; 95%CI 0.39–0.80; p < 0.002) compared that of patients treated without palliative gastrectomy. An improvement in survival was also observed in patients with stage M1 gastric cancer who received palliative gastrectomy (HR 0.62; 95%CI 0.49–0.78; p < 0.0001), especially those with peritoneal dissemination (HR = 0.76, 95%CI 0.63–0.92), liver metastasis (HR = 0.41, 95%CI 0.30–0.55), or distant lymph-node metastasis (HR = 0.36, 95%CI 0.23–0.59). Combined hepatic resection may be beneficial for patients who under palliative gastrectomy (HR 0.30; 95%CI 0.15–0.61; p = 0.0008). The overall survival of patients who underwent palliative gastrectomy combined with chemotherapy was significantly improved (HR 0.63; 95%CI 0.47–0.84; p = 0.002). Conclusions: From the results of the meta-analysis, palliative gastrectomy for patients with incurable advanced gastric cancer may be associated with longer survival, especially for patients with stage M1 gastric cancer. Combined hepatic resection for patients with liver metastasis and chemotherapy may be beneficial factors compared to simple palliative gastrectomy.

The application of radiogenomics in oncology has great prospects in precision medicine. Radiogenomics combines large volumes of radiomic features from medical digital images, genetic data from high-throughput sequencing, and clinical-epidemiological data into mathematical modelling. The amalgamation of radiomics and genomics provides an approach to better study the molecular mechanism of tumour pathogenesis, as well as new evidence-supporting strategies to identify the characteristics of cancer patients, make clinical decisions by predicting prognosis, and improve the development of individualized treatment guidance. In this review, we summarized recent research on radiogenomics applications in solid cancers and presented the challenges impeding the adoption of radiomics in clinical practice. More standard guidelines are required to normalize radiomics into reproducible and convincible analyses and develop it as a mature field.

Lung adenocarcinoma is the most common type of lung cancer. Known risk variants explain only a small fraction of lung adenocarcinoma heritability. Here, we conducted a two-stage genome-wide association study of lung adenocarcinoma of East Asian ancestry (21,658 cases and 150,676 controls; 54.5% never-smokers) and identified 12 novel susceptibility variants, bringing the total number to 28 at 25 independent loci. Transcriptome-wide association analyses together with colocalization studies using a Taiwanese lung expression quantitative trait loci dataset (n = 115) identified novel candidate genes, including FADS1 at 11q12 and ELF5 at 11p13. In a multi-ancestry meta-analysis of East Asian and European studies, four loci were identified at 2p11, 4q32, 16q23, and 18q12. At the same time, most of our findings in East Asian populations showed no evidence of association in European populations. In our studies drawn from East Asian populations, a polygenic risk score based on the 25 loci had a stronger association in never-smokers vs. individuals with a history of smoking (P_interaction = 0.0058). These findings provide new insights into the etiology of lung adenocarcinoma in individuals from East Asian populations, which could be important in developing translational applications.