Micro-RNAs as minimally invasive biomarkers for diagnosis, staging and outcome prediction in prostate cancer patients

Results: NGS revealed that plasma derived from PCa patients showed a significant alteration in miRs expression displaying an overexpression of 34 and a down regulation of 17 miRs compared to BPH samples. We successfully validated, the upregulation of one (4732-3p) and the downregulation of four miRs(98-5p, let-7a-5p, 26b-5p, and 21-5p) in PCa samples compared to controls(p value (< 0.05). Multivariate and ROC analyses show miR-26b-5p as a strong predictor of PCa, with an AUC 0.89 (p< 0.0001). Furthermore, combining two miRs 26b-5p and 98-5p have the best predictive power in discriminating PCa from BPH patients. Given the different outcomes between low-and high-grade PCa, it is fundamental in its management the possibility of identified its grade. We found that miR-4732-3p levels were significantly higher while miR-26b-5p and miR-98-5p levels were lower in HG compared LG group. In addition, logistic regression analysis showed that miR-26b-5p was an independent predictor of the presence of a High-Grade PCa. While Roc analysis showed that miR-26b-5p and miR-4732-3p had the highest diagnostic accuracies for High Grade prostate cancer patients with an AUC of 0.78 (CI 0.69-0.87; p= 0.0001) and 0.73 (CI 0.60-0.87; p= 0.002), respectively.Conclusions: Our results showed as NGS miR evaluation could be used to detect patients with prostate cancer and using selected mIR as miR-4732-3p can differentiate low grade versus high grade PCa. Our result if externally validated can be used to develop new non-invasive and accurate marker of PCa and high-grade prostate cancer.