Does miR-1 play a role in malignant pleural mesothelioma development and progression?

Our plain-English summary of Does miR-1 play a role in malignant pleural mesothelioma development and progression?, by C.M. Wright, M.B. Kirschner, N. van Zandwijk, et al (Chest, 2013).

The study

• Authors: C.M. Wright, M.B. Kirschner, N. van Zandwijk, G. Reid
• Journal: Chest
• Published: 2013;144(6):1971
• Type of article: Letter, Comment
• Read it: PubMed · Publisher

In plain English

This item is a letter to the editor, not a research study, and it reported no new data. Its authors, from the Asbestos Diseases Research Institute in Australia, commented on a November 2013 CHEST article by Xu et al. That article reported miR-1 as a potential marker of mesothelioma and suggested that overexpressing it may induce apoptosis (cell death). The letter's authors agreed that using unmatched normal pleura as the comparison tissue was a good choice. They raised several concerns: candidate microRNAs were checked by a second method in only four of the 26 tumors; only miR-1 was followed up even though related microRNAs showed greater underexpression; methods were described in too little detail; and miR-34b, presented as novel, had already been analyzed by Kubo et al. in 2011. The authors concluded that it was difficult to judge whether the study had contributed significantly to the field. The text also includes the start of a reply from the original authors, who disagreed. They said the validation samples were chosen because the tissue was plentiful. The reply is cut off.

We wrote this plain-English summary from the full article with the help of AI, and a second AI model checked each sentence against the article. It is not the authors' wording; the abstract and the article are their own account.

What the study did and found

• Design: letter to the editor (correspondence) commenting on a published study, followed by the beginning of the original authors' response
• Who was studied: No study population of its own. The letter discusses the Xu et al. study of malignant pleural mesothelioma tumors, in which validation was done in four of 26 profiled tumors.
• Main results:
  • The letter's authors agreed that using unmatched normal pleura as the control series in the Xu et al. study was a good choice and likely the most appropriate control.
  • They questioned why candidate microRNAs were validated in only four of the 26 tumors profiled by microarray, rather than in all of them.
  • They questioned why only miR-1 was selected for further analysis when other microRNAs from the same family showed greater underexpression.
  • They stated that the methods lacked detail, for example on how reverse transcription-quantitative PCR was performed and analyzed.
  • They noted that miR-34b, described by Xu et al. as novel, had been the subject of an extensive analysis published in 2011 by Kubo et al.
  • In the partial response, the original authors denied cherry picking. They said the validation samples were selected because the tissue specimens were plentiful and would not be exhausted.
• The authors' conclusion: The letter's authors concluded that, given the missing essential details, it was difficult to judge whether the Xu et al. study had contributed significantly to the field, and that rigorous technical and biological validation is required.

Topics

The National Library of Medicine indexes this study under subjects our site covers: Lung cancer, Mesothelioma.

Medical terms in this study, explained in our Lexicon: Pleural Mesothelioma.

Related studies

• miR-1 induces growth arrest and apoptosis in malignant mesothelioma — Y. Xu, M. Zheng, et al. (2013)
• Response — Y. Xu, M. Zheng, et al. (2013)
• miR-193a-3p is a potential tumor suppressor in malignant pleural mesothelioma — M. Williams, M.B. Kirschner, et al. (2015)
• ZIC1 is silenced and has tumor suppressor function in malignant pleural mesothelioma — Y.Y. Cheng, M.B. Kirschner, et al. (2013)
• MiR-score: a novel 6-microRNA signature that predicts survival outcomes in patients with malignant pleural mesothelioma — M.B. Kirschner, Y.Y. Cheng, et al. (2015)
• Restoring expression of miR-16: a novel approach to therapy for malignant pleural mesothelioma — G. Reid, M.E. Pel, et al. (2013)

Browse more research in Chest, or return to medical research.