Endocrine Abstracts

Ovarian cancer is one of the major cause of death among women worldwide with high incidence. Ovarian cancer can be categorized into epithelial, non-epithelial (germ cell and sex cord-stromal cell), and metastatic (usually develop from surrounding cancerous organs). Recently, several approaches have been studied to control ovarian cancer at the transcriptional or post-transcriptional levels using small non coding RNAs including microRNAs. We carried out a meta-analysis of previously published miRNA expression datasets (two human database GSE119055 and GSE216150 (Dong et al., 2019; Gumusoglu-Acar et al., 2023) to identify the miRNAs and its target genes with biological processes and pathways using several bioinformatic software. Meta-analysis of miRNA datasets revealed that a total of 270 differentially expressed miRNAs, including 164 upregulated and 106 downregulated miRNAs in cancerous samples in comparison to normal samples. As a result, 12 of the DE miRNAs were identified to be shared by two human datasets (GSE119055 vs GSE216150). miRWalk analysis showed a total of 140 common target genes for these miRNAs and their functional annotation revealed that these common genes were mainly associated with signal transduction as well as in ErbB and Estrogen signaling pathways. Moreover, among these genes, AKT3, which corresponded to the both pathways provided poor prognosis of the ovarian cancer patients in Kaplan-Meier Plotter website. These findings indicated that the defined miRNAs and their target genes could be used for future molecular studies which lead to identify an early effective treatment for the ovarian cancer.

References: Dong, S. et al. (2019) ‘HOXD-AS1 promotes the epithelial to mesenchymal transition of ovarian cancer cells by regulating miR-186-5p and PIK3R3’, Journal of Experimental & Clinical Cancer Research, 38(1), pp. 1–13.

Gumusoglu-Acar, E. et al. (2023) ‘Metabolic pathways of potential miRNA biomarkers derived from liquid biopsy in epithelial ovarian cancer’, Oncol Lett, 25(4), p. 142.