Plasma Exosomal Mirnas: A Minimally Invasive Diagnostic Biomarker For Inflammatory Breast Carcinoma

Background. Inflammatory Breast Cancer (IBC) is a rare, but aggressive subtype of breast carcinoma with dermal lymphatic invasion in young females. IBC is poorly diagnosed as it develops vast rapidly relative to other non-IBC and without distinct lumps formation, moreover, it is usually misdiagnosed with mastitis. Nanosized exosomes (20-200nm) circulating in liquid biopsies are a promising minimally invasive diagnostic alternative to standard biopsies. In cancer microenvironment, they modulate cancer progression via shuttling their encapsulated microRNAs (miRNAs) into recipient cells to either trigger signaling or induce malignant transformation of targeted cells. While small non-coding regulatory miRNAs are an already known cancer biomarkers, exosomal miRNAs serve as a novel class of diagnostic biomarkers. The present study aims to evaluate the expression levels of exosomal miRNAs relevant to IBC pathogenesis. Design/Materials/Methods. This is a prospective case-control study that includes 77 females; 57 were diagnosed with breast cancer (34 non-IBC and 23 IBC), while 20 were healthy volunteers. All have signed an informed consent to be enrolled in this investigation. Patients included were neither pregnant nor issued with bloodborne or autoimmune disease, while healthy subjects had no oncologic history. Plasma circulating exosomes were isolated using precipitation and ultracentrifugation methods. The successful isolation was verified by dynamic light scattering (DLS), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Western blot (WB), and Dot blot (DB). The expression level of exosomes-derived miR-181b-5p, miR-222-5p and let-7a was quantified by qPCR. Afterwards, that expression level was verified in the human non-IBC MDA-MB-231 and IBC SUM149 cell lines. Statistics. Difference between groups was tested using Student’s t-test through IBM SPSS statistics software package, version 24. A p Citation Format: Sarah Hamdy Ahmed, Ahmed El-Damen, Mohamed A. Badawy, Mohamed El-Shinawi, Martin Gotte, Sherif Abdelaziz Ibrahim. Plasma exosomal miRNAs: A minimally invasive diagnostic biomarker for inflammatory breast carcinoma [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2020 San Antonio Breast Cancer Virtual Symposium; 2020 Dec 8-11; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2021;81(4 Suppl):Abstract nr PS19-07.