Schultz [26] NA Denmark TaqMan array human microRNA A+B Cards v2.0 664 188 (160/28) Nigel B.Jamieson [27] NB USA Agilent Human miRNA Microarray (version 2.0) 723 58 (48/10) Nicole C.Panarelli [28] NC USA FlexmiR miRNA microarray 328 27 (17/10) S Ali [29] SA USA LC Science Houston microarray NR 44 (29/15) Shuyu Zhang [30]

SZ China Exiqon miRCURY LNA array 1200 40 (20/20), 20 pairs Yuichi Nagao [31] YN Japan Toray 3D-Gene miRNA microarray >900 79 (65/24) Abbreviations: NR not reported, pairs, cancerous and normal samples from the same patient. Sapitinib The number of patients with PDAC that were investigated in these eleven studies ranged from 8 to 160 (median 47). The studies employed a diversity of microarray platforms (either commercial or custom), and the average number of miRNAs assayed was 778 (ranging from 377 to 1200; data were missing in SC79 clinical trial three papers [23, 24, 29]). Only five studies [21–23, 26, 27] provided the whole list of differentially expressed miRNAs, while the others presented

only a portion of their data. Our pooled dataset included a total of 538 tumour samples and 206 noncancerous control samples (at least), as in some studies, the number of noncancerous control samples was not specified [22]. A total of 439 differentially expressed miRNAs were reported in the eleven miRNA expression profiling studies; 254 were up-regulated and 185 were down-regulated in at least one study. Among the 439 miRNAs, 98 were reported in at least two studies; 77 (78.57%) with a consistent direction (Tables 2 PDK4 and 3) and 21 with an inconsistent direction (Table 4) among the studies. Among the 77 miRNAs with a consistent direction, 50 were reported to be up-regulated (Table 2) and 27 were reported to be down-regulated (Table 3). One miRNA (miR-155) was reported

in eight studies, three miRNAs (miR-21, miR-100 and miR-221) were reported in seven studies and twelve miRNAs were reported in at least five studies, with a consistent direction in all reports (Table 5). The miRNAs that were consistently reported in at least five studies are shown in Table 5. Although there were no strong disagreements between the individual miRNA profiling studies, the top lists varied considerably from study to study. Table 2 Up-regulated miRNAs (n=50) reported in at least two expression profiling studies miRNA name Studies with the same direction (reference) No. of tissue samples tested Mean fold-change Mean rank hsa-miR-155 AE, AP, AS, EJ, MB, NB, NC, YN 329 4.98 12.62 hsa-miR-21 AE, MB, NA, NB, NC, SZ, YN 376 2.95 12.29 hsa-miR-100 AE, AS, EJ, MB, NB, NC, YN 317 8.07 13.00 hsa-miR-221 AE, AP, AS, EJ, MB, NB, NC 264 6.71 11.42 hsa-miR-31 AE, AP, AS, NA, YN 344 5.44 10.00 hsa-miR-10a AE, AS, MB, NB, YN 280 2.50 14.60 hsa-miR-23a AE, AP, AS, MB, NB 229 3.46 22.60 hsa-miR-143 AE, AP, MB, NB, YN 203 4.03 9.