The mimics or inhibitors of miR-148-3p and/or miR-152-3p could downregulated or upregulated KLF4 expression, respectively. miR-148-3p and miR-152-3p-induced PCa cell growth inhibition were observed both in vivo and in vitro.
In summary, a four miRNA panel, including miR-152-3p which likely targets genes with key roles in prostate cancer pathogenesis, has the potential to improve early prostate cancer diagnosis.
Among them, miR-101-3p and miR-145-5p have been previously reported as biomarkers for PCa metastasis and the remaining three, i.e. miR-204-5p, miR-198 and miR-152, were screened as novel biomarkers for PCa metastasis.
TGFα was upregulated in PCa tissue samples compared with that in adjacent normal ones. miR-152 expression was significantly decreased in primary PCa samples compared with that in non-malignant samples.
The expression level of miR-146a showed a trend of up-regulation in prostate cancer, and the expression level of miR-152 had a trend of down-regulation in prostate cancer, and the results of partial correlation analysis showed that the expression level of miR-146a and miR-152 was negatively correlated with each other in the serum of the patients with prostate cancer.
We found that miR-152-3p was underexpressed in PCa and that lower expression levels were associated with promoter hypermethylation in accordance with TCGA dataset analysis.