# Circulating miR-16-5p, miR-92a-3p and miR-451a are biomarkers of lung cancer in Tunisian patients

## TL;DR

This study identifies three microRNAs in the blood of Tunisian lung cancer patients that could serve as potential biomarkers for the disease.

## Contribution

The study validates the relevance of specific microRNAs as lung cancer biomarkers in a Tunisian population.

## Key findings

- High levels of miR-16-5p, miR-92a-3p, and miR-451a in plasma distinguish untreated lung cancer patients from healthy individuals.
- Chemotherapy reduces miR-16-5p and miR-451a expression in lung cancer patients.
- The findings align with global studies, suggesting these microRNAs regulate cancer pathways.

## Abstract

Lung cancer is one of the most common type of cancer and, despite significant advances in screening and diagnosis approaches, a large proportion of patients at diagnosis still present advanced stages of the disease with distant metastasis and bad prognosis. Finding and validating biomarkers of lung cancer is therefore essential. Such studies are often conducted on European, American and Asian populations and the relevance of these biomarkers in other populations remains less clear. In that prospect, we investigated the expression level of seven microRNAs, chosen from the medical literature (miR-16-5p, miR-92a-3p, miR-103a-3p, miR-375-3p, miR-451a, miR-520-3p and miR-let-7e-5p), in the blood of Tunisian lung cancer patients, treated or not by chemotherapy, and healthy control individuals. We found that high expression levels of circulating miR-16-5p, miR-92a-3p and miR-451a in the plasma of untreated patients discriminate them from healthy control individuals. In addition, miR-16-5p and miR-451a expression levels are significantly reduced in the plasma of chemotherapy-treated patients compared to untreated patients. Our results confirmed previous work in other populations worldwide and provide further evidence that circulating miR-16-5p, miR-92a-3p and miR-451a potentially regulate key pathways involved in the initiation and progression of cancer.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12885-024-12181-1.