MICRORNAS AS EARLY GASTRIC CANCER (GC) BIOMARKERS

The harmful effects of gastric cancer can be identified worldwide. This form of cancer must be identified as soon as possible, as early detection significantly improves survival rates. Unfortunately, there are little to no early detection procedures that are cost-efficient and non-invasive. However, the discovery of microRNAs (miRNAs) is slowly changing this. miRNAs are molecules that circulate in your blood and can often predict the presence of a tumor based on whether the molecule is over-expressed or down-regulated. Using this information and a previous gastric cancer miRNA biomarker panel developed by the Singapore Gastric Cancer Consortium (SGCC), my project set out to establish the viability of miRNAs as biomarkers by testing the molecules in our lab’s genetically modified cancerous mice model. We selected three of the twelve miRNA molecules from the SGCC’s panel and set out to identify the difference in miRNA levels between gastric cancer mice, healthy mice, and water as our negative control.