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Updated: Jun 22, 2026
miRNA Expression Analyses in Prostate Cancer Clinical Tissues
Published on: September 8, 2015
Urine analysis and protein networking identify met as a marker of metastatic prostate cancer
Andrea L Russo1, Kimberly Jedlicka, Meredith Wernick
1Radiation Oncology Branch, National Cancer Institute, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center, Tampa, Florida, USA.
Purpose:
Metastatic prostate cancer is a major cause of death of men in the United States. Expression of met, a receptor tyrosine kinase, has been associated with progression of prostate cancer.
Experimental Design:
To investigate met as a biomarker of disease progression, urinary met was evaluated via ELISA in men with localized (n = 75) and metastatic (n = 81) prostate cancer. Boxplot analysis was used to compare the distribution of met values between each group. We estimated a receiver operating characteristic curve and the associated area under the curve to summarize the diagnostic accuracy of met for distinguishing between localized and metastatic disease. Protein-protein interaction networking via yeast two-hybrid technology supplemented by Ingenuity Pathway Analysis and Human Interactome was used to elucidate proteins and pathways related to met that may contribute to progression of disease.
Results:
Met distribution was significantly different between the metastatic group and the group with localized prostate cancer and people with no evidence of cancer (P < 0.0001). The area under the curve for localized and metastatic disease was 0.90, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.84 to 0.95. Yeast two-hybrid technology, Ingenuity Pathway Analysis, and Human Interactome identified 89 proteins that interact with met, of which 40 have previously been associated with metastatic prostate cancer.
Conclusion:
Urinary met may provide a noninvasive biomarker indicative of metastatic prostate cancer and may be a central regulator of multiple pathways involved in prostate cancer progression.
