Characterizing the landscape of peritoneal exosomal microRNAs in patients with ovarian cancer by high-throughput sequencing

In the present study, differentially expressed microRNAs (miRNAs) in peritoneal exosomes that were isolated from 10 patients with epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) with metastasis in the abdominal cavity and 10 participants without cancer (NC) were identified. These differentially expressed miRNAs that were revealed by next-generation sequencing were categorized by Gene Ontology enrichment and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway enrichment analysis of their target genes. Notably, two miRNAs that were associated with EOC-miR-149-3p and miR-222-5p-were identified. There were significant differences in expression of miR-149-3p and miR-222-5p between EOC and NC samples, and the effect of the expression level of the two miRNAs on the patient survival was identified using publicly available data from The Cancer Genome Atlas. There is an association between these two miRNAs and EOC, that was further verified by reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction in peritoneal exosomes from 10 patients with EOC and NC participants. These results indicated that miR-149-3p and miR-222-5p might be novel biomarkers for evaluating the prognosis of patients with EOC and that these two miRNAs might have potential therapeutic values.