Circulating human cytomegalovirus-encoded HCMV-miR-US4-1 as an indicator for predicting the efficacy of IFN? treatment in chronic hepatitis B patients.

ABSTRACT: The efficacy of interferon ? (IFN?) therapy for chronic hepatitis B (CHB) patients is about 40% and often associates with adverse side-effects, thus identification of an easy accessible biomarker that can predict the outcome of IFN? treatment for individual CHB patients would be greatly helpful. Recent reports by us and others show that microRNAs encoded by human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) were readily detected in human serum and can interfere with lymphocyte responses required by IFN? therapeutic effect. We thus postulate that differential expression profile of serum HCMV miRNAs in CHB patients may serve as indicator to predict the efficacy of IFN? treatment for CHB patients. Blood was drawn from 56 individual CHB patients prior to IFN? treatment. By quantifying 13 HCMV miRNAs in serum samples, we found that the levels of HCMV-miR-US4-1 and HCMV-miR-UL-148D were significantly higher in IFN?-responsive group than in IFN?-non-responsive group. In a prospective study of 96 new CHB patients, serum level of HCMV-miR-US4-1 alone classified those who were and were not responsive to IFN-? treatment with correct rate of 84.00% and 71.74%, respectively. In conclusion, our results demonstrate that serum HCMV-miR-US4-1 can serve as a novel biomarker for predicting the outcome of IFN? treatment in CHB patients.

SUBMITTER: Pan Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4785337 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature