Genomic edition with CRISPR/Cas9 to evaluate the role of MMP9 and the regulator miR21 in Prostate Cancer

Abstract

Prostate Cancer (PC) corresponds to 10% of all cancers, being considered the sixth common neoplasm in the world. The high prevalence represents a major health problem, with a strong economic impact, the screening, the diagnosis, the treatment and the disease. The treatments are done according to the patient diagnosis. In high-risk and metastatic cases, it is a systemic treatment through surgical or drug castration. However, treatment in about 80% of patients with metastatic tumor does not present efficiency. The response to this resistance of tumor cells, can be caused by genetic alterations, generating mutations, chromosomal alterations and also related to gene expression. MicroRNAs play an important role in the regulation of oncogenes, such as miR-21, which acts on the RECK tumor suppressor gene and MMP-9 oncogene, acting in the process of migration and invasion of tumor cells into other tissues, generating metastasis.Due to the importance of these genes in carcinogenesis, further investigations are needed regarding their role in CP, these investigations are based on the silencing of these molecules to better evaluate their role. To date the studies are performed with RNAi and ASO, however, these techniques have limitations, by only silencing, reducing gene expression, but not blocking them completely. With the CRISPR-Cas9 technique, from the prokaryote invader resistance system adapted for eukaryotes, it is possible to edit the genome and complete blocking of these markers, which allows a better study of them in several pathologies, especially for the cancer. Thus, we believe that are extremely important to study the molecular markers miR-21 and MMP-9 in metastatic Prostate Cancer using this new methodology. (AU)