Introduction: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the third major cause of malignant tumor-related death worldwide because it is initially diagnosed in the advanced stage and its therapeutic outcomes are usually poor. Based on this, it is urgent to identify effective early diagnosis biomarkers and new therapeutic targets to promote HCC treatment. Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been reported as promising biomarkers for tumor diagnosis and treatment.
Materials and methods: In this study, we profiled expression patterns and dysregulation of lncRNAs in HCC tissues by analyzing two datasets GSE55191 and GSE64631 from Gene Expression Omnibus database firstly, each of which contains expression profiles of 3 primary HCC tissues and 3 normal liver tissues, respectively.
Results: LncRNA 882 (LINC00882) is one of the lncRNAs that was significantly upregulated in HCC tissues compared with normal liver tissues. We verified the upregulation of LINC00882 in HCC by using two separate cohorts that contained 85 HCC tissues and paired adjacent noncancerous tissues and 86 HCC tissues and 89 independent noncancerous liver tissues, respectively.
Discussion: We found that upregulation of LINC00882 is correlated with poorer prognosis of HCC patients. In vitro cell experiments demonstrated that knockdown of LINC00882 inhibits proliferation, migration and invasion of HCC cell lines.
Conclusion: These results indicated that LINC00882 promotes HCC progression and could be a potential prognostic biomarker and therapeutic target for HCC.
Keywords: hepatocellular carcinoma, long noncoding RNAs, LINC00882, proliferation, migration