RESUMEN
Purpose To observe the effect of specific miR-448 inhibitor on the proliferation and migration of prostate cancer cells and its molecular mechanism. Methods Real-time fluo-rescent quantitative polymerase chain reaction ( qRT-PCR) was used to detect the expression of miR-448 in normal prostate epi-thelial cells and cancer cells. The cells with the highest expres-sion of miR-448 were selected for follow-up experiment. The miR-448 inhibitor or miR-NC was transferred into prostate canc-er cells using liposome transfection reagent. The expression of miR-448 and CMTM3 mRNA were detected by qRT-PCR. The expression of related proteins were detected by Western blotting. MTT assay was used to detect the cell proliferation activity. Tr-answell assay was used to detect the cell migration ability. Re-sults The expression of miR-448 in normal prostate epithelial cells was significantly lower than that in cancer cells ( P ＜0. 01), and the expression of miR-448 was the highest in DU- 145 cells ( P ＜0. 01). The expression of miR-448 in DU-145 cells was down-regulated 48 h after transfection with miR-448 in-hibitor (P＜0. 01). The expression of CMTM3 mRNA was up-regulated (P＜0. 01). The expression of CMTM3, E-cadherin and β-catenin proteins were up-regulated. The expression of N-cadherin and Snail proteins were down-regulated. Cell prolifera-tion was decreased (P＜0. 05). Cell migration ability decreased (P ＜ 0. 01 ). Conclusion miR-448 is highly expressed in prostate cancer cells. miR-448 inhibitor can down-regulate the expression of miR-448 in DU-145 cells, up-regulate the expres-sion of CMTM3 protein, inhibit the proliferation and migration of prostate cancer cells, which showing a potential function in mo-lecular therapy of prostate cancer.