High-Throughput Profiling of Circulating miRNA with Firefly's? Serum Plus miRNA Assay

摘要

MicroRNAs are regulatory RNAs that play a critical role in development and disease progression. Circulating miRNAs are promising biomarkers for many clinical applications, including the identification and stratification of diseases. While recent studies have demonstrated that measuring multiple markers may increase the power of a diagnostic test, the validation of a biomarker signature requires the analysis of large patient cohorts. Current multiplexing techniques, such as microarrays and NGS, allow superior target density but suffer from low sample throughput, while qPCR-based methods typically provide higher throughput but only a limited numbers of targets. Although circulating miRNAs represent ideal biomarkers due to their accessibility, relative stability, and tissue-specific expression, miRNAs are very rare in circulation requiring a highly sensitive assay. Additionally, validation studies generating profiles over several miRNAs across hundreds of samples generates significant computational and analytical barriers to measuring statistical significance.