Abstract

Circulating microRNAs in Extracellular Vesicles as Prognostic and Predictive Biomarker for Metastatic Colorectal Cancer

Klara Cervena, , Institute of experimental medicine

Systematic therapy, whose gold standard is a combination of chemotherapy and targeted therapy, remains a mainstay of metastatic CRC (mCRC) treatment. The choice of the treatment strategy is affected by various clinical factors and biomarkers. Although several predictive biomarkers have previously been suggested, only a few of them are being used in routine clinical practice. The importance of these markers is highlighted by the fact that approximately 20% of CRC patients have metastatic disease at the time of diagnosis. Recently, we have identified that circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) - miR-122-5p and miR-142-5p - show high potential for early detection of CRC as well as for the assessment of patient´s outcome and response to therapy. These miRNAs, isolated from plasma extracellular vesicles of repeated samplings from 20 mCRC patients, were further studied for their potential to predict the therapy response. The first sampling was performed at the time of post-therapy developed liver metastasis and other samplings were collected approximately every 3 months over one year. Detailed results of the study will be presented during the meeting. We believe that our results may add to new prognostic and predictive biomarkers associated with therapy response in mCRC patients.