Identification of urinary exosomal non-coding RNAs biomarkers for high-grade prostate cancer using RNA-seq analysis

Prostate cancer is one of the major cancers that seriously affect men's health. The low specificity of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) for prostate cancer has resulted in the overdiagnosis and subsequent overtreatment of clinically indolent tumors. There is an urgent need for noninvasive and easy diagnostic assays to help evaluate whether a prostate biopsy is warranted. Many non-coding RNAs (eg, microRNAs, long non-coding RNAs, circular RNAs) have been reported to play key roles in prostate cancer progression, showing great potential to impact cancer diagnostics and therapies. Remarkably, exosomes secreted by cells into body fluids contain molecules that reflect the disease information, and urinary exosomes could be used to detect prostate cancer as a new type of liquid biopsies. Non-coding RNAs are enriched and stable in exosomes. We performed high-throughput sequencing on urine-derived exosomes of 11 patients with high-grade (Gleason score 7 or greater) prostate cancer and 11 patients with benign prostatic hyperplasia to screen differentially expressed non-coding RNAs. Overall design: We performed deep RNA-sequencing on exosomal RNA extracted from urinary exosomes of 11 patients with high-grade prostate cancer and 11 patients with benign prostatic hyperplasia using HiseqX