Abstract
PURPOSE: (Tumor-educated platelets) TEPs have emerged as active players in all steps of tumorigenesis, confrontation of platelets with tumor cells via transfer of tumor-associated biomolecules and results in the sequestration of such biomolecules. The current study was aimed to examine whether TEPs lncRNA-STARD4-AS1 and ELOA-AS1 might be potential biomarkers for NSCLC. MATERIALS AND METHODS: TEPs were obtained by low-speed centrifugation. Quantitative real-time PCR was used to determine the expression level of TEPs-STARD4-AS1, ELOA-AS1 in the training cohort and the validation cohort. ROC curve was generated to evaluate their diagnostic value. Correlations between TEPs-STARD4-AS1, ELOA-AS1 and clinical parameters were further analyzed. RESULTS: Our results showed that the level of TEPs-STARD4-AS1 and ELOA-AS1 significantly upregulated in patients with NSCLC compared with healthy controls in the two cohorts. By ROC analysis, we found that TEPs-STARD4-AS1, ELOA-AS1 could offer valuable diagnostic performance for NSCLC patients (AUC(STARD4-AS1) = 0.800/0.774, and AUC(ELOA-AS1) = 0.754/0.718 for diagnosing adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma cases from controls, respectively). The combination of TEP-STARD4-AS1 and ELOA-AS1 improved the diagnostic efficiency of NSCLC. Clinicopathological analysis further revealed that TEPs-STARD4-AS1 level significantly correlated with tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) stage (p = 0.011), while TEPs-ELOA-AS1 expression significantly correlated with tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) stage and (p = 0.019) distant metastasis (p = 0.004). CONCLUSION: Our data suggested that TEPs-STARD4-AS1 and ELOA-AS1 are promising non-invasive circulating diagnostic markers for NSCLC.