Tumor-Educated Platelets lncRNA-STARD4-AS1 and ELOA-AS1 as Potential Novel Biomarkers for the Early Diagnosis of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

ChangLiang Luo; Zhongyuan Lin; Fangfang Huang; Leping Ning; Yulin Yuan

doi:10.2147/CMAR.S498516

Tumor-Educated Platelets lncRNA-STARD4-AS1 and ELOA-AS1 as Potential Novel Biomarkers for the Early Diagnosis of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

Cancer Manag Res. 2025 Jan 3:17:1-9. doi: 10.2147/CMAR.S498516. eCollection 2025.

Authors

ChangLiang Luo¹, Zhongyuan Lin¹, Fangfang Huang¹, Leping Ning¹, Yulin Yuan¹

Affiliation

¹ Department of Clinical Laboratory, The People's Hospital of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Nanning, Guangxi, 530021, People's Republic of China.

Abstract

Purpose: (Tumor-educated platelets) TEPs have emerged as active players in all steps of tumorigenesis, confrontation of platelets with tumor cells via transfer of tumor-associated biomolecules and results in the sequestration of such biomolecules. The current study was aimed to examine whether TEPs lncRNA-STARD4-AS1 and ELOA-AS1 might be potential biomarkers for NSCLC.

Materials and methods: TEPs were obtained by low-speed centrifugation. Quantitative real-time PCR was used to determine the expression level of TEPs-STARD4-AS1, ELOA-AS1 in the training cohort and the validation cohort. ROC curve was generated to evaluate their diagnostic value. Correlations between TEPs-STARD4-AS1, ELOA-AS1 and clinical parameters were further analyzed.

Results: Our results showed that the level of TEPs-STARD4-AS1 and ELOA-AS1 significantly upregulated in patients with NSCLC compared with healthy controls in the two cohorts. By ROC analysis, we found that TEPs-STARD4-AS1, ELOA-AS1 could offer valuable diagnostic performance for NSCLC patients (AUC_STARD4-AS1 = 0.800/0.774, and AUC_ELOA-AS1 = 0.754/0.718 for diagnosing adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma cases from controls, respectively). The combination of TEP-STARD4-AS1 and ELOA-AS1 improved the diagnostic efficiency of NSCLC. Clinicopathological analysis further revealed that TEPs-STARD4-AS1 level significantly correlated with tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) stage (p = 0.011), while TEPs-ELOA-AS1 expression significantly correlated with tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) stage and (p = 0.019) distant metastasis (p = 0.004).

Conclusion: Our data suggested that TEPs-STARD4-AS1 and ELOA-AS1 are promising non-invasive circulating diagnostic markers for NSCLC.

Keywords: ELOA-AS1; NSCLC; STARD4-AS1; diagnosis; tumor-educated platelets.

Grants and funding

This research was supported by Guangxi Natural Science Foundation under Grant No. 2022GXNSFBA035515 and Self-funded research project of The Health Committee of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region under Grant No.Z-A20220100.