Endocrine Abstracts

Background: MiRNAs are small non-coding RNAs, which regulate biological and pathological processes, including organogenesis, apoptosis, cell proliferation and differentiation. Considering the complexity of the parathyroid cancer (PC) diagnosis, discovering of new markers of the disease, which may help to evaluate the prognosis before surgical treatment, becomes an important problem. We studied the differences in miRNA expression profile in the blood serum between patients with malignant and benign parathyroid tumors for better understanding of the molecular processes, which may play a role in parathyroid tumorigenesis and may serve as diagnostic markers for PC.

Aims: To develop a specific miRNA panel for the differential diagnosis of the carcinoma of the parathyroid glands (PG).

Materials and methods: Serum samples were taken from persons with clinically and laboratory confirmed primary hyperparathyroidism (PHPT) and stored frozen at −20°C. After the morphological analysis of postoperative material, the patients were divided into 2 groups: patients with adenomas of the PG (n=6) and patients with cancer of the PG with metastasis (n=6). To perform a simultaneous comparative expression analysis of 760 microRNAs, the «TaqMan OpenArray Human MicroRNA Panel» (Thermo Fiher) was used in conducting of real-time PCR reaction on «QuantStudio 12K Flex» station.

Results: We detected 14 miRNAs which level was significantly lower in patients with parathyroid carcinoma in compare to miRNAs in patients with parathyroid adenoma: miRNA-186 (P=0.006), miRNA let-7e (P=0.019), miRNA-195 (P=0.009), miRNA 16 (P=0.005), miRNA-15b (P=0.037), miRNA-146b (P=0.037), miRNA-19b (P=0.004), miRNA-106b (P=0.018), miRNA-126 (P=0.043), miRNA 342-3p (P=0.005), miRNA-17 (P=0.017), miRNA-320 (P=0.039), miRNA-25 (P=0.005), miRNA-93 (P=0.037).

Conclusions: The pilot study showed that 14 miRNAs could help to differentiate benign tumors from malignant tumors before a surgery and predict metastases. The next step of this study would be the analysis of the sensitivity and specifity of the result on a bigger sample of patients.