Evaluation of Exosomal miRNA as Potential Biomarkers in Cervical Cancer
, Emanuelly Bernardes-Oliveira 3, Ronnier de Oliveira 4, Maysa Eunice Grigorio Bezerra Lima 5, Ana Katherine Gonçalves 1,3,6, Deyse de Souza Dantas 3,7 and Janaina Cristiana de Oliveira Crispim 1,7,*Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This review tries to identify exosomal biomarkers in cervical cancers. The purpose of this review is not clear from this manuscript. If the authors are trying to assess the diagnostic utility of a miRNA biomarker panel for cervical cancers then they need to carry out a systematic review. Alternately the authors may want to summarize the studies looking at exosomal miRNAs in cervical cancer. They would then need to include all the published literature in this area and not just 7 papers as described in this review.
The manuscript lacks insights into selecting miRNA based biomarkers for detection and progression of cervical tumours. In the results section the authors have merely stated the findings of each study published earlier without discussing how these studies together advance the field. As the authors point out there is no agreement between two published studies in this area on which miRNA biomarkers are suitable for detection of cervical cancer. The authors do not provide any such insights on how to tackle this problem apart from suggesting increased sample size. Given the variation in patient cohorts, sample collection, processing of samples and measurement of RNA expression, it is not suprising that no two studies have any agreement on which miRNAs are useful in detection of cervical cancer. The authors need to discuss these challenges in the review article and also discuss ways of overcoming these challenges.
Although the authors describe the inclusion exclusion criteria it is not clear WHY and HOW these criteria were designed. For eg the uthors say 183 duplicates were excluded from these study. What do the authors mean by duplicates?
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors used a literature search to examine exosome-derived miRNAs that are useful in the diagnosis and prognosis of cervical cancer and summarized them.
I think it is very well structured and easy to understand.
As the authors already pointed out in Limitation, they did not find any common miRNAs across the seven studies. This may reflect differences in their respective measurement methods, which makes this Review less valuable.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The revised manuscript reads better and the authors have addressed the reviewers comments. The added sections increase the clarity of the manuscript. The manuscript still has typographical errors that need to be corrected. For eg the word eligibility is misspelled in Figure 1. The authors should also use consistent terminology. For eg, the authors use miR-X in some places and miRNA-X in others.
Author Response
Dear reviewer, we thank you for your comments regarding this manuscript. We clarify that the microRNA, miRNA and miR terminologies refer to the same point. Therefore following the your suggestion, and the terminology adopted other articles referenced in this review, we standardize the use of miRNA throughout the manuscript.
The manuscript was reviewed by a native English speaker.
