New combined microRNA and protein plasmatic biomarker panel for pancreatic cancer

Lack of diagnostic makers results in loss of operation opportunity in that most patients are diagnosed at the late stage. Pancreatic cancer (PC) has been regarded as a fatal disease with a 5-year survival rate below 10%. Therefore, the development of diagnostic biomarkers for PC is in urgent need to control the mortality of the disease. This is a case-control study including 640 plasma samples from healthy controls (HC), patients with benign pancreatic diseases (BPD), patients with PC; and patients with other gastrointestinal (GI) cancers. Eight biomarker candidates, including miR-20a, miR-21, miR-25, miR-155, miR-196a, miR-210, Macrophage Inhibitory Cytokine-1(MIC-1) and CA19-9, were evaluated to establish two diagnostic indexes in this study. The plasma level of the six miRNAs and MIC-1, CA19-9 were elevated in PC patients compared with those of healthy controls (P