Overview of current microRNA biomarker signatures as potential diagnostic tools for leukaemic conditions

Alfred Buhagiar; Joseph Borg; Duncan Ayers

doi:10.1016/j.ncrna.2020.02.001

Overview of current microRNA biomarker signatures as potential diagnostic tools for leukaemic conditions

Noncoding RNA Res. 2020 Feb 19;5(1):22-26. doi: 10.1016/j.ncrna.2020.02.001. eCollection 2020 Mar.

Authors

Alfred Buhagiar¹, Joseph Borg², Duncan Ayers^{3

4}

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Medicine and Surgery, University of Malta, Msida, MSD 2080, Malta.
² Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Malta, Msida, MSD 2080, Malta.
³ Centre for Molecular Medicine and Biobanking, University of Malta, Msida, MSD2080, Malta.
⁴ Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health Sciences, The University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, United Kingdom.

Abstract

Haematological malignancies encompass all variations of leukaemia at both the chronic and acute level, together with the specific cell type induced into tumourigenesis. Current diagnostic protocols for leukaemic conditions rely heavily on cytomorphology and other histological examinations from bone marrow aspirates, with the latter being a highly invasive surgical procedure for the patient. The discovery of microRNAs as one of the key gene regulatory networks in the past two decades has enabled researchers to investigate the possibility of exploiting the identification of dysregulated expression profiles for specific microRNAs present in the leukaemic patient's bloodstream as novel liquid biopsy diagnostic tools. This review article serves to consolidate recent global research efforts aiming to achieve such scopes.

Keywords: ALL; AML; CLL; CML; Leukaemia; Liquid biopsy; miRNA; microRNA.

Publication types

Review