Cancer research
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The inability to forecast outcomes for malignant mesothelioma prevents clinicians from providing aggressive multimodality therapy to the most appropriate individuals who may benefit from such an approach. We investigated whether specific microRNAs (miR) could segregate a largely surgically treated group of mesotheliomas into good or bad prognosis categories. A training set of 44 and a test set of 98 mesothelioma tumors were analyzed by a custom miR platform, along with 9 mesothelioma cell lines and 3 normal mesothelial lines. ⋯ Increased expression of hsa-miR-29c* predicted a more favorable prognosis, and overexpression of the miR in mesothelioma cell lines resulted in significantly decreased proliferation, migration, invasion, and colony formation. Moreover, major epigenetic regulation of mesothelioma is mediated by hsa-miR-29c* and was shown through downregulation of DNA methyltransferases as well as upregulation of demethylating genes. A single miR has the potential to be a prognostic biomarker in mesothelioma, and validation of these findings as well as investigation of its downstream targets may give insight for potential therapies in the future.