Background: Pancreatic cancer (PC) remains one of the most lethal cancers. In contrast to the steady increase in survival for most cancers, the 5-year survival remains low for PC patients.
Methods: We describe a new pipeline that can be used to identify prognostic molecular biomarkers by identifying miRNA-mediated subpathways associated with PC. These modules were then further extracted from a comprehensive miRNA-gene network (CMGN). An exhaustive survival analysis was performed to estimate the prognostic value of these modules.
Results: We identified 105 miRNA-mediated subpathways associated with PC. Two subpathways within the MAPK signaling and cell cycle pathways were found to be highly related to PC. Of the miRNA-mRNA modules extracted from CMGN, six modules showed good prognostic performance in both independent validated datasets.
Conclusions: Our study provides novel insight into the mechanisms of PC. We inferred that six miRNA-mRNA modules could serve as potential prognostic molecular biomarkers in PC based on the pipeline we proposed.
Keywords: gene; miRNA; pancreatic cancer; pathway; survival.
Copyright © 2020 Liu, Cui, Bai, Feng, Li, Han, Ai, Zhang, Li, Han, Zhu, Jiang, Pan, Wang, Xu, Li and Wang.