REVIEW article
Front. Oncol.
Sec. Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention
Volume 15 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fonc.2025.1615433
This article is part of the Research TopicEquity in Cancer Prevention and Early DetectionView all articles
Exosomal ncRNAs in Liquid Biopsy: A New Paradigm for Early Cancer Diagnosis and Monitoring
Provisionally accepted
- 1Southwest University, Chongqing, China
- 2State Key Laboratory of Silkworm Genome Biology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China
- 3College of Biological Sciences and Technology, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, Beijing, China
- 4Department of Neurosurgery, Children‘s Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, Chongqing Municipality, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Cancer's aggressive nature and delayed diagnoses often result in poor prognoses and limited treatment outcomes. Early detection, personalized treatments, and effective monitoring are essential for improving cancer management. Traditional tumour biomarkers, such as beta-2 microglobulin and Carcinoembryonic Antigen (CEA), are often yield inaccurate and inconclusive results. Recently, exosomal cargoes, especially non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) such as microRNAs (miRNAs), long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), and circular RNAs (circRNAs), have gained attention as promising tools for the early, non-invasive detection of cancer. For instance, serum exosomal long ncRNA FOXD2-AS1 has demonstrated promising diagnostic potential in colorectal cancer (CRC), achieving an overall AUC of 0.736 across all patients and an improved AUC of 0.758 specifically for early-stage CRC, highlighting its effectiveness as a stage-specific biomarker for early detection and clinical assessment.Similarly, exosomal lncRNA-GC1 has effectively distinguished gastric cancer patients from controls and related conditions, with AUCs exceeding 0.86, thereby outperforming traditional markers such as CA 72-4, CEA, and CA19-9, which all scored below 0.79. Despite their great potential, the clinical application exosomal ncRNAs remains limited. This review highlights recent advancements in exosomal ncRNA research and their potential as diagnostic markers, addressing both the opportunities and challenges for clinical implementation.
Keywords: Exosomal ncRNA, miRNAs, lncRNAs, CircRNAs, biomarkers, liquid biopsies, non-invasive
Received: 21 Apr 2025; Accepted: 06 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Li, Ghani, Du, Li, Zhao, Yang, Liang and Ke. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xiaoxue Ke, State Key Laboratory of Silkworm Genome Biology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.