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Quantifying Micro RNA Levels of Colon

ABSTRACT: Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common cancer and the fourth leading cause of cancer-related death in the world. Despite potentially curative surgery and the use of modern adjuvant chemotherapy, up to 40% of CRC patients subsequently develop local tumor relapse or metastatic disease. Currently, aside from post-operative pathological staging, early follow up of the patients does not include a specific test or any other evaluation that could predict disease recurrence. Therefore, exploring and identifying novel biomarkers of CRC’s following diagnosis of the primary tumor may help us in identifying patients at high risk for recurrence. Modifications in signaling pathways and their regulation by microRNAs (miRNAs) are being evaluated as biomarkers and therapeutic targets for cancer in general and CRC in particular. It has been established, although not completely, that miRNAs have a role in initiation and progression of CRC. Modifications of miRNAs have been recorded in CRC tumors, and the expression patterns of these miRNAs could in principle biomark this cancer’s phenotype. As miRNAs are well documented to regulate critical molecules in signaling pathways, their regulation of tumor relevant pathways may also serve to further sub-classify patients into drug responsive groups. Moreover, miRNAs may be sampled from peripheral blood and are available as a non-invasive diagnostic method, their application as biomarkers is of special interest. In this study the investigators aim to quantify miRNA levels in human colon and rectal tumors, tumor adjacent and normal tissues. By comparing this data from a large cohort of patients, the investigators aim to identify specific, relevant miRNAs that may serve as biomarkers to stratify CRC patients according to their clinical characteristics such as disease stage, specific treatment, prognosis and disease recurrence.

DISEASE(S): Colorectal Neoplasms,Colorectal Carcinoma (crc) Patients

PROVIDER: 2134048 | ecrin-mdr-crc |

REPOSITORIES: ECRIN MDR

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Project description:Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the major causes of cancer-related death worldwide, for which diagnosis and prognosis are still inadequate mainly due to local recurrence and metastasis, although medical and surgical treatment in cancer therapy advanced. Diagnosis is frequently late, the high capacity of CRC to infiltrate and develop metastasis has the consequence that 40% of patients with CRC have metastasis in liver already at the time of diagnosis. The prognosis of CRC is closely related to the stage, but classification of patients is affected by a great variability in response to therapy and clinical outcome. The localization of the tumor determines a huge inter-tumoral heterogeneity and the intra-tumoral heterogeneity connected to the tumor microenvironment increases the complexity. The heterogeneity typical of CRC is also associated to the several oncogenic signaling pathways, among them the glucose-related pathways, indeed, the glucose metabolic reprogramming of cancer cells appears to be implicated in the malignant progression of CRC. This metabolic alteration seems to be associated to the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), which is considered the main event promoting the invasion and migration of CRC cells. However, the comprehensive understanding of the molecular mechanisms associated to EMT in CRC is still a challenge and despite decades of research, the process of tumor dissemination is insufficiently understood. Therefore, it is necessary to identify novel biomarkers associated with the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of CRC, as well as potential therapeutic targets. In this context, we performed a large-scale shotgun proteomic investigation on CRC with the aim of discover novel potential protein hallmarks able to distinguish with high specificity and sensitivity tumoral tissue from the health one, and to classify the superficial and the internal deep tumoral tissues. The EMT process is driven by the deep tumoral cells in CRC, therefore, to find significant differences at proteomic levels with respect to the peripheric tumoral tissue and to the healthy mucosa, and to identify specific classifying factors can be useful to individuate potential biomarkers of CRC invasiveness and potential therapy targets. Moreover, the functional enrichment analysis of proteomic data can provide information on biological processes implicated and associated to the variations of the protein profiles, and thus, help to understand the molecular mechanism associated to the CRC progression and malignance. Our approaches coupling high-throughput proteomic strategy with highly accurate statistical and enrichments analysis highlighted not only confirmation on potential biomarkers already proposed in other studies but also novel biomarkers able to distinguish with high sensitivity and specificity the deep tumor from the superficial one and to the healthy mucosa. Our investigation suggested a strong contribution of proteins implicated in metabolic pathways as catalytic and regulatory activities, some of them with high classifying power and potentially useful as biomarker and therapeutic target.

Project description:Colorectal carcinoma is the third leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States. In order to understand the mechanism/signaling pathways responsible for invasion, migration and metastasis in colorectal cancer, we developed an integrative and comparative genetic approach to infer transcriptional regulatory mechanisms underlying colon cancer progression. Accordingly, we filtered fourteen human colorectal cancer (CRC) microarray data sets, from an immune competent mouse model of metastasis to identify known and novel transcriptional regulators in CRC. Using this approach, Nuclear Factor of Activated T cells (NFAT) family of transcription factors were identified as metastasis driver of colon cancer. NFAT family of transcription factors is known to induce gene transcription in various disease processes, including carcinogenesis. We used parental and metastatic derivatives of MC38 mouse colon cancer cells (MC38Par and MC38Met, respectively) to evaluate the role of NFATc1 in cancer cell invasiveness. We found that high NFATc1 expression correlates with significantly increased (p<0.0001) Trans-Endothelial Invasion (TEI) in MC38Met cells. Conversely, RNAi-based inhibition of NFATc1 expression and functional inhibition with calcineurin inhibitor FK506 in MC38Met cells, both resulted in significant decreased TEI (p=0.0193 & p=0.0003). Furthermore, a set of predicted NFATc1 target mRNAs identified in our original analysis were downregulated by knock-down of NFATc1 or functional inhibition with FK506 in MC38Met cells. The expression level (mRNA) of predicted gene targets were high in human CRC specimens which had higher than median NFATc1 mRNA expression (n=11 out of total 22). The tumor-associated NFATc1 co-regulated gene signature is significantly correlated with both disease-specific and disease-free survival in Stage II and III CRC patients. We have successfully demonstrated a bioinformatics approach to identify a tumor promoter driver gene NFATc1. Our studies suggest a role of NFATc1 towards invasion and its co-regulated gene signature for poor outcomes in colorectal cancer. We developed an integrative and comparative genetic approach to infer transcriptional regulatory mechanisms underlying colon cancer progression. Using this approach, the Nuclear Factor of Activated T cells (NFAT) family of transcription factors were identified as metastasis driver of colon cancer. We used parental and metastatic derivatives of MC38 mouse colon cancer cells (MC38Par and MC38Met, respectively) to evaluate the role of NFATc1 in cancer cell invasiveness [GSE19073]. We found that high NFATc1 expression correlates with significantly increased (p<0.0001) Trans-Endothelial Invasion (TEI) in MC38Met cells. Conversely, RNAi-based inhibition of NFATc1 expression and functional inhibition with calcineurin inhibitor FK506 in MC38Met cells, both resulted in significant decreased TEI (p=0.0193 & p=0.0003). Furthermore, a set of predicted NFATc1 target mRNAs identified in our original analysis were downregulated by knock-down of NFATc1 or functional inhibition with FK506 in MC38Met cells. Finally, we generated a microarray gene expression dataset based on tumor samples collected from 122 CRC patients and tested whether the tumor-associated NFATc1co-regulated gene signature is correlated with patient survival. The following clinical information can be found in the characteristics fields of each sample; AJCC_STAGE: stage of cancer classified by AJCC (American Joint Committee on Cancer) staging system DFS_EVENT: disease free survival; cancer recurrence=1, no recurrence=0 DFS_TIME: disease free survival time (months) DSS_EVENT: disease specific survival; death from cancer=1,no death=0 DSS_TIME: disease specific survival time (months)

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Quantifying Micro RNA Levels of Colon

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