Arrighetti Noemi, Beretta Giovanni Luca
Molecular Pharmacology Unit, Department of Applied Research and Technological Development, Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, 20133 Milan, Italy.
Pharmaceutics. 2021 Mar 13;13(3):380. doi: 10.3390/pharmaceutics13030380.
Prostate cancer (PCa) is the fifth cause of tumor-related deaths in man worldwide. Despite the considerable improvement in the clinical management of PCa, several limitations emerged both in the screening for early diagnosis and in the medical treatment. The use of prostate-specific antigen (PSA)-based screening resulted in patients' overtreatment and the standard therapy of patients suffering from locally advanced/metastatic tumors (e.g., radical prostatectomy, radiotherapy, and androgen deprivation therapy) showed time-limited efficacy with patients undergoing progression toward the lethal metastatic castration-resistant PCa (mCRPC). Although valuable alternative therapeutic options have been recently proposed (e.g., docetaxel, cabazitaxel, abiraterone, enzalutamide, and sipuleucel-T), mCRPC remains incurable. Based on this background, there is an urgent need to identify new and more accurate prostate-specific biomarkers for PCa diagnosis and prognosis and to develop innovative medical approaches to counteract mCRPC. In this context, microRNA (miRNAs) emerged as potential biomarkers in prostate tissues and biological fluids and appeared to be promising therapeutic targets/tools for cancer therapy. Here we overview the recent literature and summarize the achievements of using miRNAs as biomarkers and therapeutic targets/tools for fighting PCa.
前列腺癌（PCa）是全球男性肿瘤相关死亡的第五大原因。尽管PCa的临床管理有了显著改善，但在早期诊断筛查和医学治疗方面都出现了一些局限性。基于前列腺特异性抗原（PSA）的筛查导致患者过度治疗，而局部晚期/转移性肿瘤患者的标准治疗（如根治性前列腺切除术、放疗和雄激素剥夺治疗）显示出有限的疗效，患者会进展为致命的转移性去势抵抗性PCa（mCRPC）。尽管最近提出了一些有价值的替代治疗选择（如多西他赛、卡巴他赛、阿比特龙、恩杂鲁胺和西妥昔单抗），但mCRPC仍然无法治愈。基于这一背景，迫切需要识别用于PCa诊断和预后的新的、更准确的前列腺特异性生物标志物，并开发创新的医学方法来对抗mCRPC。在此背景下，微小RNA（miRNAs）作为前列腺组织和生物体液中的潜在生物标志物出现，并似乎成为癌症治疗中有前景的治疗靶点/工具。在这里，我们概述了最近的文献，并总结了使用miRNAs作为对抗PCa的生物标志物和治疗靶点/工具所取得的成果。
