Introduction: Breast cancer is the most common malignancy in women, causing high mortality in the affected patients. The identification of circulating tumor biomarkers in blood could be considered as non-invasive strategy for early diagnosis and prognosis. The aim of this study was to investigate the presence of PRNCR1 (prostate cancer associated non-coding RNA 1) gene in the plasma of patients with breast cancer and to evaluate its expression compared to the normal ones.

Materials & Methods: This study was carried out on the 32 blood samples from breast cancer patients and 25 ones from healthy women. The RNA was extracted from the plasma of the samples. Subsequently, the presence of RNA of PRNCR1 gene in plasma of patients was quantitatively evaluated by a real-time polymerase chain reaction (Real-Time PCR). Moreover, the expression of PRNCR1 gene was studied in terms of clinico-pathological characteristics of patients. The statistical analysis of data was performed in SPSS software using  t-test.

Findings: The results showed that the PRNCR1 gene could be detected in the plasma of cancer patients. The obtained results indicated significantly higher expression in tumor samples, compared to the healthy ones (P<0.05). However, statistical data showed that the expression of PRNCR1 gene in tumor samples does not have any significant correlation with clinical-pathological characteristics, including tumor size, age, and lymph node involvement (P>0.5).