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Comment by i000 | Hacker News Reader

Circular RNAs are really "hot" these days. But, one should keep in mind that the amount of virtually all circular RNAs is lower in cancer (compared to non-cancerous adjacent normal tissue), thus they are not very promising as biomarkers. Also, their biological role is unclear. We did comprehensive literature review on this topic and found nothing truly convincing.

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That some circRNAs are lower in cancer than in normal tissue is a reliably detectable difference and is precisely what makes them an excellent biomarker.

There's additional evidence shown here: "Using circular RNA as a novel type of biomarker in the screening of gastric cancer". http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cca.2015.02.018

I am aware of this study. Funny, how they show expression in deltaCT to make it appear higher in cancer ;). But regardless, the marker has a specificity of 0.62 - really that excellent? Such a high false-positive rate does not belong anywhere near a patient sample.

Our goal is to add additional markers to current candidates using our enrichment tech. It helps to remember that up until the ILMN/Solexa machine came online around 2005-6, we could not reliably detect (statistically) MAFs in heterogenous tumor samples below about 20% on the 454 platform (depending on how much cash you threw at the sample). Point is, our enrichment platform allows a deep dive into signals that have yet to be identified as reliable and low variance biomarkers.

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