Stepwise detection and evaluation reveal miR-10b and miR-222 as a remarkable prognostic pair for glioblastoma

Despite the existence of many clinical and molecular factors reported that contribute to survival in glioblastoma, prevailing studies fell into partial or local feature selection for survival analysis. We proposed a feature selection strategy including not only joint covariate detection but also its evaluations, and performed it on miRNA expression profiles with glioblastoma. MiR-10b and miR-222 were selected as the most significant two-dimensional feature. Crucially, we integrated in vitro experiments on GBM cells and in vivo studies on a mouse model of human glioma to elucidate the synergistic effects between miR-10b and miR-222. Inhibition of miR-10b and miR-222 strongly suppress GBM cells growth, invasion, and induce apoptosis by co-targeting PTEN and leading to activation of p53 ultimately. We also demonstrated that miR-10b and miR-222 co-target BIM to induce apoptosis independent of p53 status. The results define mir-10b and mir-222 important roles in gliomagenesis and provided a reliable survival analysis strategy.