Identification of microRNAs associated with the survival of patients with gallbladder carcinoma

OBJECTIVE: This study investigated micro (mi)RNAs associated with the survival of patients with gallbladder carcinoma (GBC). METHODS: miRNA expression profiling was carried out of 40 cancerous tissues from GBC patients with long-term (n = 20) and short-term (n = 20) survival and eight healthy gallbladder tissues from the Gene Expression Omnibus database. miRNAs dysregulated in GBC patients with long-term or short-term survival were identified using GEO2R and VennDiagram packages, and analyzed by miRNA target prediction tools and the clusterProfiler package. RESULTS: Compared with healthy gallbladder tissues, 104 and 124 miRNAs were dysregulated in cancerous tissues of GBC patients with long-term survival and short-term survival, respectively. Two miRNAs (hsa-miR-142-5p and hsa-miR-146b-5p) and 22 miRNAs (such as hsa-miR-30a-3p, hsa-miR-660-5p, and hsa-miR-338-3p) were exclusively dysregulated in GBC patients with long-term and short-term survival, respectively. Enrichment analysis revealed that miRNAs exclusively dysregulated in GBC patients with short-term survival were involved in 46 biological processes, 10 cellular components, 11 molecular functions, and 44 pathways such as morphogenesis of an epithelium, response to transforming growth factor beta, heterochromatin, and phosphatase binding. CONCLUSION: This study not only identified some promising biomarkers for predicting survival in GBC patients, but also contributed to our understanding of the pathogenesis and prognosis of GBC.