Integrative analysis of urinary microRNAs for prostate cancer detection: A proof-of-concept study

Area of Science:

• Oncology
• Genomics
• Biomarker Discovery

Background:

• Liquid biopsies offer non-invasive methods for cancer detection and monitoring.
• Urinary microRNAs (miRNAs) are stable biomarkers with roles in gene expression and tumor progression.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify novel urinary microRNAs (miRNAs) as diagnostic biomarkers for prostate cancer (PCa).
• To evaluate the diagnostic performance of candidate miRNAs using multi-omics data and clinical validation.

Main Methods:

• Integrative analysis of public microarray, bulk RNA-seq, and single-cell RNA-seq datasets.
• Differential expression analysis to identify miRNAs between PCa patients and healthy controls.
• Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, support vector machine (SVM) modeling, and quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) validation.

Main Results:

• miR-23b-3p was consistently downregulated across various datasets (urine, serum, tissue).
• ROC and SVM analyses demonstrated strong diagnostic potential for miR-23b-3p.
• Urinary qPCR validation showed an AUC of 0.79, sensitivity of 0.73, and specificity of 0.86.

Conclusions:

• miR-23b-3p is a potential complementary biomarker for non-invasive prostate cancer diagnosis.
• Further large-scale validation studies integrating transcriptomic and clinical data are necessary to confirm clinical utility.