Study of Mir-141 and its Potential Targeted mRNA PTEN Expression in Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma:From in Silico to Initial Experiment Analysis

Recently, accumulating evidences indicated that microRNA-141 (miR-141) is associated with NPC due to their abilities to affect the expression of genes that modulate tumorigenesis. Unfortunately, there is still limited publication about miR-141 expression in Vietnamese nasopharyngeal cancer patients. In this study, we adopted bioinformatics tools, such as Pictar, Target Scan, miRDB, etc. to predict its target gene. As the results, PTEN (phosphatase and tensin homolog gene), acts oncogenic role associated with biological processes lead to the nasopharyngeal carcinogenesis, was identified as the direct target of miR-141. Experimentally, we reported the evaluation of miR-141 and PTEN expression in NPC biopsy samples and non-cancerous swab samples. The present study demonstrated that miR-141 was upregulated 9.38 times, and PTEN expression was significantly lowered in NPC biopsy samples compared to non-cancerous epithelial swab samples. Our finding demonstrated that the miR-141 was upregulated and PTEN was down regulated in NPC biopsy samples. In the upcoming research, a larger clinical sample size from patients at each stage of the NPC will be performed to understand the expression pattern of the miR-141 and PTEN for further applied in early diagnosis and prognosis as well as therapeutic of NPC.