LncRNA PVT1 as an effective biomarker for cancer diagnosis and detection based on transcriptome data and meta-analysis

PURPOSE: Long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) PVT1 was detected all types of cancer from Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project; however, the role of PVT1 in cancer is not clear. This study aimed to reanalyze and determine the effect of PVT1 on cancer diagnosis, especially detection in serum. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Differential expression of PVT1 between cancers and corresponding normal tissues and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve were analyzed for all types of cancers in TCGA database. RevMan5.3, Meta-DiSc1.4 and STATA14.0 were used to estimate pooled diagnostic effects of PVT1 in tissue as well as serum. RESULTS: Compared to corresponding normal tissues, PVT1 expression was significantly upregulated in 18 types of cancer and further being an effective diagnosis biomarker in 16 of them. For the 23 diagnosis tests performed in tissue, the pooled AUC and diagnostic odd ratio (DOR) were estimated to be 0.81 (95% CI: 0.76–0.86) and 17.25 (95% CI: 8.43–35.27), when the pooled AUC and DOR were 0.83 (95%CI: 0.75–0.91) and 13.86 (95% CI: 4.70–40.66) for serum tests. Furthermore, the pooled sensitivity and specificity were 0.83 (95% CI: 0.76–0.89) and 0.74 (95% CI:0.70–0.84) for tissue as well as 0.81 (95% CI: 0.76–0.86) and 0.76 (95% CI:0.70–0.81) for serum. CONCLUSIONS: PVT1, especially in serum, might be a usable biomarker for cancer diagnosis / detection.