Clinical significance of survivin and vascular endothelial growth factor mRNA detection in the peripheral whole blood of breast cancer patients.

Survivin and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) have been reported to overexpress in various human cancer tissues and peripheral blood, but have rarely been studied in the whole blood of breast cancer patients. So we want to investigate the mRNA expression of survivin and VEGF in whole blood of patients with breast cancer and explore the value of these two factors as biomarkers for possible early detection. Levels of survivin and VEGF mRNA expression in the whole blood of 43 early stage breast cancer patients and 25 normal controls were detected by qRT-PCR and the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve for each factor was constructed. As a result, the levels of suvivin and VEGF mRNA in breast cancer patients were 2.24 and 2.92 folds compared to normal controls, respectively and the difference was significant (P=0.0003 and P<0.0001, respectively). The cutoff value for differentiating breast cancer patients and normal people was 8.081×10-3 for survivin and 13.23 ×10-3 for VEGF. At the cutoff value, the area under ROC curve (AUC) for survivin was 0.7674, the sensitivity and specificity were 83.72% and 64%, respectively; For VEGF, it was 0.9163, the sensitivity and specificity were 93.02% and 88%, respectively. When combined the two factors, the AUC was 0.8981, the sensitivity and specificity reached to 95.35% and 84%, respectively. Furthermore we found that there was a significant correlation between survivin and VEGF mRNA (r=0.3970, p=0.0084). No significant difference was found between the expression levels of these two factors and the clinical pathological data. Thus, we came to a conclusion that it was a convenient and sensitive method to detect survivin and VEGF mRNA in the whole blood using qRT-PCR, and these two factors could be useful tumor biomarkers for early detection of breast cancer.