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.
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.
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.
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.