Evaluation of serum exosomal LncRNA‐based biomarker panel for diagnosis and recurrence prediction of bladder cancer

Abstract Exosomes are small membrane vesicles released by many cells. These vesicles can mediate cellular communications by transmitting active molecules including long non‐coding RNA s (lnc RNAs ). In this study, our aim was to identify a panel of lnc RNA s in serum exosomes for the diagnosis and recurrence prediction of bladder cancer ( BC ). The expressions of 11 candidate lnc RNA s in exosome were investigated in training set (n = 200) and an independent validation set (n = 320) via quantitative real‐time PCR . A three‐lnc RNA panel ( PCAT ‐1, UBC 1 and SNHG 16) was finally identified by multivariate logistic regression model to provide high diagnostic accuracy for BC with an area under the receiver‐operating characteristic curve ( AUC ) of 0.857 and 0.826 in training set and validation set, respectively, which was significantly higher than that of urine cytology. The corresponding AUC s of this panel for patients with Ta, T1 and T2‐T4 were 0.760, 0.827 and 0.878, respectively. In addition, Kaplan‐Meier analysis showed that non‐muscle‐invasive BC ( NMIBC ) patients with high UBC 1 expression had significantly lower recurrence‐free survival ( P = 0.01). Multivariate Cox analysis demonstrated that UBC 1 was independently associated with tumour recurrence of NMIBC ( P = 0.018). Our study suggested that lnc RNA s in serum exosomes may serve as considerable diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers of BC .