Bioinformatics Screening of Potential Biomarkers from mRNA Expression Profiles to Discover Drug Targets and Agents for Cervical Cancer

Abstract

Bioinformatics analysis has been playing a vital role in identifying potential genomic biomarkers more accurately from an enormous number of candidates by reducing time and cost compared to the wet-lab-based experimental procedures for disease diagnosis, prognosis, and therapies. Cervical cancer (CC) is one of the most malignant diseases seen in women worldwide. This study aimed at identifying potential key genes (KGs), highlighting their functions, signaling pathways, and candidate drugs for CC diagnosis and targeting therapies. Four publicly available microarray datasets of CC were analyzed for identifying differentially expressed genes (DEGs) by the LIMMA approach through GEO2R online tool. We identified 116 common DEGs (cDEGs) that were utilized to identify seven KGs (AURKA, BRCA1, CCNB1, CDK1, MCM2, NCAPG2, and TOP2A) by the protein–protein interaction (PPI) network analysis. The GO functional and KEGG pathway enrichment analyses of KGs revealed some important functions and signaling pathways that were significantly associated with CC infections. The interaction network analysis identified four TFs proteins and two miRNAs as the key transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulators of KGs. Considering seven KGs-based proteins, four key TFs proteins, and already published top-ranked seven KGs-based proteins (where five KGs were common with our proposed seven KGs) as drug target receptors, we performed their docking analysis with the 80 meta-drug agents that were already published by different reputed journals as CC drugs. We found Paclitaxel, Vinorelbine, Vincristine, Docetaxel, Everolimus, Temsirolimus, and Cabazitaxel as the top-ranked seven candidate drugs. Finally, we investigated the binding stability of the top-ranked three drugs (Paclitaxel, Vincristine, Vinorelbine) by using 100 ns MD-based MM-PBSA simulations with the three top-ranked proposed receptors (AURKA, CDK1, TOP2A) and observed their stable performance. Therefore, the proposed drugs might play a vital role in the treatment against CC.