Gene expression profiling identifies potential biomarkers for colorectal cancer using NanoString nCounter assay

The purpose of this study was to identify the differentially expressed genes and new potential predictive and prognostic molecular biomarkers for CRC. We identified 101 genes that were upregulated and 76 genes that were downregulated in metastatic tumors. After validation, a reduced set of 27 genes revealed evident correlation with CRC in the tumor tissue. Several genes in the pan-cancer panel showed significant differential expression, which were more universal than others in the CRC tissue. Since some of them have not been reported as being directly related to CRC yet, future mechanism studies can be designed based on this study.Our study demonstrated NanoString nCounter assay could serve as an alternative approach for gene expression analysis and identified several unreported differently expressed genes in CRC patients, which may provide some important clues for more in-depth study of CRC and may serve as potential predictive molecular biomarkers for clinical diagnosis application as well. In this study, CRC and matched normal tissues acquired from the same patient were used to extract total RNA. The NanoString nCounter assay was applied to determine the differentially expressed genes. The results were then validated using the TCGA data.