| Abstract |
Lung cancer exhibits the highest mortality rate among all human neoplasias and non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) accounts for 85% of all lung cancer cases. Despite the advancement of high throughput technologies, the 5 year survival rate of lung cancer still remains grim, thus rendering the need of finding suitable biomarkers for the early detection of the disease imperative. In the last few years, researchers' interest has shifted towards long-non coding RNAs (lncRNAs), which are implicated in a great aspect of regulatory functions and are frequently deregulated in cancer. This study is sought to elucidate the expression profile of different lncRNAs in primary NSCLC and adjacent normal tissues in order to point out promising biomarkers for lung cancer diagnosis.
We proved that 7 out of 8 lncRNAs, derived from a microarray screen, which has been completed by the Lung Cancer Group at the University of Liverpool, displayed remarkably elevated levels of expression in tumour tissues in comparison to their corresponding normal with higher significant levels, in a cohort of 60 paired normal/tumour samples from NSCLC cancer patients. The study of expression achieved by performing real-time PCR analysis. Besides, we have demonstrated that there is a significant association between the expression of lncRNAs and distinct clinicopathological characteristics, such as histological type of NSCLC, nodal involvement, gender and differentiation status, as well as patients' survival. What is more, we speculate that the regulation of lncRNAs expression may be partially affected by DNA methylation, by using well-established epigenetic modifiers. Furthermore, we investigated a new transcript variant of a repressed lncRNA which has not been previously described and may be suggested as an alluring biomarker for lung cancer diagnosis.
Lastly, we screened all the available lung cancer cell lines in order to induce particular lncRNAs and to ascertain their functional importance in lung cancer development. However, this process is still ongoing.
Overall, our findings suggest that our set of lncRNAs may serve as a surrogate biomarker either of diagnosis or risk prediction of NSCLC.
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Investigation of long non coding RNAs deregulation in lung cancer
