microRNA profiling of Iraqi patients with gastric cancer

Abstract

Abstract Background: Gastric cancer has the fifth place commonly identified malignancy and third principal cause of cancer-related fatalities globally, with over 1 million cases globally. Since each miRNAs regulates multiple target mRNAs that participate in a variety of biological processes, including signal transduction, cell differentiation, apoptosis, and proliferation, totaling 30% of protein-coding genes. Thus, deregulation of miRNAs has a role in a variety of clinical diseases, including GC and characterize a developing field of cancer research. The goal of this study was to investigate the signature of miRNA profile in Iraqi patients with gastric cancer. Methods: One-hundred tissue specimens include 50 cancerous tissues and 50 normal tissues from 50 patients were collected for miRNA profiling by microarray assay. Results Our results exhibited that 37 miRNAs were up-regulated in patients with gastric cancer (P <0.05), and 40 miRNAs were down-regulated in patients with gastric cancer (P <0.05). Then, 3 highly overexpressed miRNAs (miR-221-3p, miR-106a-5 and miR-21-5p) were chosen for further validated by Real-Time polymerase chain reaction. In the validation set, the level of (miR-106a-5, miR-21-5p and miR-221-3p) were tested by qRT-PCR have significant up-regulation in GC related to normal tissues (P <0.05). Conclusions: According to our present findings, the 3 miRNAs (miR-106a-5, miR-21-5p and miR-221-3p) strongly suggested involvement in gastric carcinogenesis, hence highlighting its serving as promising prognostic, diagnostic biomarkers or therapeutic targets for gastric cancer patients.