engleski

The interplay between micro-RNA molecules and apoptosis-associated genes in high-grade serous ovarian cancer

Ovarian cancer is the seventh most frequent tumor type in women and the fifth leading cause of cancer-related deaths among women worldwide. In Croatia there are around 500 new cases annually while about 300 women die every year because of ovarian cancer. Its high death rate, particularly for a serous type which is the most frequent, is a result of the fact that most patients are diagnosed at an advanced stage of the disease. Therefore, there is a need for new knowledge about what causes ovarian cancer as well as new approaches toward better earlier diagnosis and therefore better effect on therapy. One of the hallmarks of tumor cells is their ability to resist apoptosis, a process of programmed cell death. Deregulation of apoptosis plays a key role in the pathogenesis and progression of cancer, and leads also to chemotherapy resistance, what is a characteristic and one of the reasons of high mortality rate of high-grade serous ovarian cancer. According to the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway database, at the moment there are 140 known apoptosis-associated genes in human genome. In addition, it is known that many microRNA molecules, a major class of small RNA molecules that post-transcriptionally inhibit gene expression, can regulate those apoptosis-associated genes. Therefore, there is a need for better elucidation of the interplay between microRNA molecules and apoptosis-associated genes. In this talk I will present our research on microRNA and gene expression profiling of high-grade serous ovarian cancer. We used microarray technology which allows us to determine the expression patterns of more than 2, 500 human microRNAs or over 26, 000 protein-coding genes in a single experiment. Furthermore, from this sea of data, using various bioinformatic tools and databases, we were able to construct the microRNA:target gene interaction networks related to (dys)regulation of apoptosis in high-grade serous ovarian cancer. These results could help us to understand better the etiology of this type of ovarian cancer and to discover new diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers, as well as new targets for therapies.

apoptosis genes ; microRNAs ; expression ; microarrays ; ovarian cancer

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