Identification of Gene and MicroRNA Signatures for Oral Cancer Developed from Oral Leukoplakia.

In clinic, oral leukoplakia (OLK) may develop into oral cancer. However, the mechanism underlying this transformation is still unclear. In this work, we present a new pipeline to identify oral cancer related genes and microRNAs (miRNAs) by integrating both gene and miRNA expression profiles. In particular, we find some network modules as well as their miRNA regulators that play important roles in the development of OLK to oral cancer. Among these network modules, 91.67% of genes and 37.5% of miRNAs have been previously reported to be related to oral cancer in literature. The promising results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approach.