Abstract
Prostate cancer (PCa) is the fifth cause of tumor-related deaths in man worldwide. Despite the considerable improvement in the clinical management of PCa, several limitations emerged both in the screening for early diagnosis and in the medical treatment. The use of prostate-specific antigen (PSA)-based screening resulted in patients’ overtreatment and the standard therapy of patients suffering from locally advanced/metastatic tumors (e.g., radical prostatectomy, radiotherapy, and androgen deprivation therapy) showed time-limited efficacy with patients undergoing progression toward the lethal metastatic castration-resistant PCa (mCRPC). Although valuable alternative therapeutic options have been recently proposed (e.g., docetaxel, cabazitaxel, abiraterone, enzalutamide, and sipuleucel-T), mCRPC remains incurable. Based on this background, there is an urgent need to identify new and more accurate prostate-specific biomarkers for PCa diagnosis and prognosis and to develop innovative medical approaches to counteract mCRPC. In this context, microRNA (miRNAs) emerged as potential biomarkers in prostate tissues and biological fluids and appeared to be promising therapeutic targets/tools for cancer therapy. Here we overview the recent literature and summarize the achievements of using miRNAs as biomarkers and therapeutic targets/tools for fighting PCa.
Highlights
Prostate cancer (PCa) is the third most commonly diagnosed malignancy and the fifth cause of cancer death in men worldwide [1]
The results showed a miRNA overexpression in both tissue and serum samples of PCa compared to BPH
Despite the success reached by miRNAs as laboratory tools, and the numerous studies published far, the use of nucleic acids as PCa-selective drugs showed inconclusive results
Summary
Prostate cancer (PCa) is the third most commonly diagnosed malignancy and the fifth cause of cancer death in men worldwide [1]. (iii) bone-targeting radiotherapy (radium-223) and (iv) immunotherapy (sipuleucel-T), the medical management of mCRPC still represents an important clinical issue [2] These pieces of evidence underline the urgent need to develop valuable tools for PCa diagnosis and innovative medical interventions, including new drugs [3,4] as well as drug delivery approaches [5]. Efforts aimed at developing tests for more precise diagnosis are expected and PCa biomarkers discovery is a booming new wave [8] In this context, the development of novel tools based on prostate-specific small noncoding single-stranded RNAs (miRNA) showed usefulness in dissecting between BPH and PCa and in defining the disease aggressiveness [9,10].
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