Extracellular RNA has potential as a non-invasive biomarker in IBD

In the development of biomarkers for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), liquid biopsies showed promising results in a Belgian pilot study. The presence of unique extracellular RNAs accurately distinguished Crohn’s disease (CD) from ulcerative colitis (UC). Future larger studies should examine the potential of this novel non-invasive tool in-depth.

Liquid biopsies have been studied in oncology as a potential tool for diagnostics and prognostics [1]. Dr Bram Verstockt (University Hospital Leuven, Belgium) and colleagues designed a pilot study to examine the value of extracellular RNA in IBD patients [2].

In the serum of 26 participants, 60,675 unique extracellular RNAs could be identified. Dr Verstockt explained that this is over 75% of all annotated intestinal transcripts specifically expressed in the gut that are known in the literature. Therefore, this method is able to capture essential extracellular RNAs in the serum of IBD patients. In addition, weighted gene co-expression analysis demonstrated that certain clusters of extracellular RNAs were associated with diagnosis of IBD disease type. After running an independent machine learning pipeline, a panel of 8 extracellular RNAs were able to differentiate between CD and UC with an accuracy of 96.2%. Dr Verstockt argued that the functional link with a known genome-wide association study supports the results of this study [3].

1. Happel C, et al. J Cancer Metastasis Treat 2020;6:32
2. Verstockt B, et al. Extracellular RNAs as liquid biopsy non-invasive biomarker in IBD. OP14, ECCO 2021 Virtual Congress, 2-3 & 8-10 July.
3. Mirkov MU, et al. Lancet Gastroenterol Hepatol 2017;2(3):224-234

 

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Posted on 2 July, 20218 April, 2024