Abstract
Molecular biomarkers in tissues and body fluids represent a promising source to improve cancer diagnostics. Bronchoscopic Microsampling (BMS) of Endobronchial epithelial lining fluid (ELF) is a potent method to investigate potential biomarkers in lung diseases. Recent studies report Tenascin C (TNC), an important component of the extracellular matrix involved in tissue remodeling and cell signaling, to be differentially expressed in malignant pulmonary nodules.
We investigated whether specific splice variations of TNC are differentially expressed in ELF collected by the BMS method in proximity of pulmonary nodules.
ELF was collected by the BMS method from subsegmental bronchi close to the indeterminate pulmonary nodule and from the contralateral lung. Diagnosis was confirmed by transbronchial biopsy or surgery. The study includes 176 ELF samples from a total of 88 patients (65 NSCLC and 23 benign cases) with indeterminate pulmonary nodules detected by computed tomography. Quantitative real-time PCR (RT-PCR) assays were used to detect different TNC variant patterns.
All patients underwent BMS without complications. Quantitative RT-PCR was reliably applied to all ELF samples. A significant increase of TNC transcript variants close to malignant nodules was observed for most of the used qPCR assays. A better accuracy was observed for two protein-coding variants and an untranslated transcript indicating a distinct tumor-associated TNC variant pattern and a lower intraindividual variance.
Our results indicated that the analysis of individual TNC variants might improve the accuracy in detecting malignant nodules compared to the detection of whole TNC transcripts.
- © 2013 ERS
