MicroRNA Profiling Identifies Potential Diagnostic and Prognostic Markers in Prostate Cancer

Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States and Europe. Diagnosis and risk estimation of cancer recurrence is often critical with the common clinicopathologic parameters of prostate-specific antigen, tumor stage and grade. Therefore it is mandatory to develop new diagnostic and prognostic markers for prostate cancer. miRNAs have been shown to be novel markers in a series of other cancer types. We show for the first time, that good overall classification of normal and malignant prostate tissue was possible with combination of just two miRNAs (hsa-miR-205, hsa-miR-183). Further, hsa-miR-96 is shown to be associated with the recurrence-free interval after radical prostatectomy. Tumor tissue and normal adjacent tissue with untreated prostate carcinoma were collected after radical prostatectomy between 2001 and 2005 at Charité University Hospital, Berlin. Matched malignant (#PC (e.g. 09PC)) and non-malignant (#PN (e.g. 09PN)) tissue samples from men (mean age 63 years, range 49-74 years; mean pre-operative concentration of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) 8.21 µg/l, range 0.92-41.9 µg/l) with untreated prostate carcinoma were profiled.