Screening of potential miRNA therapeutics for the prevention of multi-drug resistance in cancer cells

Chemotherapy, a major cancer treatment approach, suffers seriously from multidrug resistance (MDR), generally caused by innate DNA repair proteins that reverse the DNA modification by anti-cancer therapeutics or trans-membrane efflux proteins that pump anti-cancer therapeutics out of the cytosol. This project focused on finding microRNAs that can regulate MDR proteins by managing corresponding mRNA levels through post-transcriptional regulation based on nucleotide sequence matching. Screening was done with bioinformatics databases for unpublished/unexplored microRNAs with high nucleotide sequence correspondence to two representative MDR proteins, MGMT (a DNA repair protein) and ABCB1 (an efflux protein), revealing microRNA-4539 and microRNA-4261 respectively. To investigate the enhancement of chemotherapeutics in cancer cells, high MGMT expressing glioblastoma (T98G) and a high ABCB1 expressing triple-negative breast cancer cell line (MDA-MB-231-luc) were treated with varying concentrations of chemotherapeutics and corresponding miRNAs. Newly identified MDR-related miRNAs (MDRmiRs) enhanced the response to anti-cancer therapeutics and resulted in effective cell death. In this study, we demonstrated that therapeutic miRNAs could be identified based on the nucleotide sequence matching of miRNAs to targeted mRNA and the same approach could be employed for the screening of therapeutic candidates to regulate specific target proteins in diverse diseases.