Bladder cancer still requires improvements in diagnosis and prognosis, because many of the cases will recur and/or metastasize with bad outcomes. Despite ongoing research on bladder biomarkers, the clinicopathological impact and diagnostic function of miRNA maturation regulators Drosha and Argonaute proteins AGO1 and AGO2 in urothelial bladder carcinoma remain unclear. Therefore, we conducted immunohistochemical investigations of a tissue microarray composed of 112 urothelial bladder carcinomas from therapy-naïve patients who underwent radical cystectomy or transurethral resection and compared the staining signal with adjacent normal bladder tissue. The correlations of protein expression of Drosha, AGO1 and AGO2 with sex, age, tumor stage, histological grading and overall survival were evaluated in order to identify their diagnostic and prognostic potential in urothelial cancer. Our results show an upregulation of AGO1, AGO2 and Drosha in non-muscle-invasive bladder carcinomas, while there was increased protein expression of only AGO2 in muscle-invasive bladder carcinomas. Moreover, we were able to differentiate between non-muscle-invasive and muscle-invasive bladder carcinoma according to AGO1 and Drosha expression. Finally, despite Drosha being a discriminating factor that can predict the probability of overall survival in the Kaplan⁻Meier analysis, AGO1 turned out to be independent of all clinicopathological parameters according to Cox regression. In conclusion, we assumed that the miRNA processing factors have clinical relevance as potential diagnostic and prognostic tools for bladder cancer.
Keywords: AGO1; AGO2; Drosha; biomarkers; bladder cancer; immunohistochemistry.