Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Science - Department of Biochemistry

Breast cancer (BC) is the second most common cancer in the world and, the most frequent cancer among women with an estimated 1.67 million new cancer cases diagnosed worldwide during 2012 which represents 25% of all cancers. In Egypt, breast cancer is the most common cancer among women. One of the major BC risk factors is the family history of the disease. Women with positive BC family history were three times more likely to get the disease. MiRNAs are short, non-protein-coding RNAs {u223C}22 nucleotides in length that are known to alter gene expression at a post-transciptional level. In recent years, circulating miRNAs have attracted a great deal of attention as promising novel markers for various diseases. Here, we investigated their potential to serve as minimally invasive, early detection markers for breast cancer in blood plasma. We profiled miRNAs extracted from the plasma of early stage breast cancer patients (taken at the time-point of diagnosis) and 23 familial high risk individuals as well as healthy control individuals using syber green RT-qPCR. one miRNA (miR-21) was shown to be significantly upregulated While miR-let 7c shown to be significantly down regulated in the plasma of early stages breast cancer patients. On the other hand, both of miR-21 and miR-148b had significant differences between early stages breast cancer patients and familial high risk individuals. In conclusion, the identified miRNAs might be of potential use in the development of a multimarker blood-based test to complement and improve early detection of breast cancer. Such a multimarker blood test might for instance provide a prescreening tool, especially for younger women, to facilitate decisions about which individuals to recommend for further diagnostic tests

Issued also as CD