MicroRNA-299-3p regulates proliferation, migration and invasion of human ovarian cancer cells by modulating the expression of OCT4.

Ovarian cancer is among the most prevalent and lethal types of cancers in women. Several factors such as late diagnosis, unavailability of the reliable biomarkers, frequent relapses and dearth of efficient therapeutic targets form bottleneck in the treatment of ovarian cancers. In this study we investigated the potential of less studied miR-299-3p as the therapeutic target for the treatment of ovarian cancer. The results of the present investigation revealed that miR-299 is significantly upregulated in the ovarian cancers and suppression of its expression inhibits the proliferation by induction of apoptosis as well suppresses migration and invasion of the SKOV3 cancers cells. Further, OCT-4 was found to be putative target of miR-99-3p in ovarian cancer and inhibition of OCT-4 had similar effects as that of miR-299 inhibition on cell migration and invasion. Intriguingly, even overexpression of miR-299-3p could not rescue the effects of OCT-4 suppression on SKOV3 cell proliferation, migration and invasion. On contrary, overexpression of OCT-4 in SKOV3 cells transfected with miR-299-3p transfected could nullify the effects of miR-200-3p on proliferation, migration and invasion of the SKOV3 cells. Taken together, miR-299-3p regulated cell proliferation and metastasis by modulating the expression of OCT-4 and as such may prove to be an important therapeutic target.