The importance of dysregulated miRNAs on ovarian cysts and tumors

Abstract

Ovarian cancer is the fifth most important cause of cancer-related deaths among women and the most lethal gynecologic malignancy. Epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) is asymptomatic and few screening tests are available. We aimed to identify novel circulating miRNAs to be used as therapeutic prediction of EOC. Moreover, another goal of our study is the importance of dysregulated miRNAs in ovarian cyst and their expression profile difference between ovarian cancer cases. In this study, we studied three different samples: serums of EOC patients, healthy individuals (HI) and benign ovarian cysts (BOC). Their miRNA expressions have been compared by microarray. Microarray data were analyzed according to miRNA expressions the relation between miRNAs target genes and EOC were examined by bioinformatic tools. 75 and 66 significantly dysregulated miRNAs were identified by microarray in BOC vs. EOC and BOC vs. HI comparison, respectively. Then, we focused on common miRNAs that found in both comparison and finally 46 important miRNAs were detected which can represent the only common sample group, BOC. After these findings, we also considered miRNA profiling in EOC and HI, and surprisingly any common miRNAs were found with these 46 miRNAs. Thus, we analyzed them depending on their potential importance on BOC pathogenesis. After bioinformatic analysis, our findings indicated that there are several biological processes and pathways which can be considered to be related BOC development.