Hsa-miR-210-3p expression in breast cancer and its putative association with worse outcome in patients treated with Docetaxel

MicroRNA-210-3p is the most prominent hypoxia regulated microRNA, and it has been found significantly overexpressed in different human cancers. We performed the expression analysis of miR-210-3p in a retrospective cohort of breast cancer patients with a median follow-up of 76 months (n = 283). An association between higher levels of miR-210-3p and risk of disease progression (HR: 2.13, 95%CI: 1.33-3.39, P = 0.002) was found in the subgroup of patients treated with Epirubicin and Cyclophosphamide followed by Docetaxel. Moreover, a cut off value of 20.966 established by ROC curve analyses allowed to discriminate patients who developed distant metastases with an accuracy of 85% at 3- (AUC: 0.870, 95%CI: 0.690-1.000) and 83% at 5-years follow up (AUC: 0.832, 95%CI: 0.656-1.000). Whereas the accuracy in discriminating patients who died for the disease was of 79.6% at both 5- (AUC: 0.804, 95%CI: 0.517-1.000) and 10-years (AUC: 0.804. 95%CI: 0.517-1.000) follow-up. In silico analysis of miR-210-3p and Docetaxel targets provided evidence for a putative molecular cross-talk involving microtubule regulation, drug efflux metabolism and oxidative stress response. Overall, our data point to the miR-210-3p involvement in the response to therapeutic regimens including Docetaxel in sequential therapy with anthracyclines, suggesting it may represent a predictive biomarker in breast cancer patients.