[Regular Paper] Identification of Several Core Overexpressed MicroRNAs that Could Predict Survival in Patients with Ovarian Cancer

MicroRNAs as biomarkers play an important role in the oncogenesis process, including ovarian cancer. The objective of this study is to evaluate the miRNAs overexpression association with survival of ovarian cancer patients. MiRNA expression levels between tumor and normal samples were compared using t-test. Differentially expressed miRNAs were selected (p-value ≤ 0.001) and only 195 up-regulated miRNAs for 565 ovarian cancer samples were further analyzed using multivariate Cox regression and survival random forest. The median survival time for ovarian cancer patient was 33.64 months. The result of survival random forest and multivariate Cox regression showed that high level expression of nine miRNAs were associated with shorten survival of ovarian cancer patients; whereas high level expression of hsa-miR-154* was significantly correlated with a prolonged overall survival ovarian cancer patients. These nine aberrantly overexpressed miRNAs that resulted shorter survival time may play important roles in oncogenesis, growth, and metastasis of ovarian cancer. Hence, these findings may be used as novel prognostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets for ovarian cancer patients.