TMPO-AS1 is an independent prognostic factor for patients with laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma

Abstract

SUMMARY OBJECTIVE Long noncoding RNA (lncRNAs) are frequently abnormally expressed in tumors and involved in the occurrence and progression of human cancer. Recently, a disease-related lncRNA, TMPO antisense RNA 1 (TMPO-AS1), was identified to be dysregulated in several tumors. Hence, we aimed to demonstrate whether TMPO-AS1 could be a promising prognostic marker for patients with laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma (LSCC). METHODS RT-PCR was performed to test TMPO-AS1 expressions in 187 LSCC specimens compared with matched normal specimens. Chi-squared tests were used to determine the associations between TMPO-AS1 expressions and the clinicopathological characteristics of LSCC patients. Then, the clinical outcome of LSCC patients who had lower or higher TMPO-AS1 expression was analyzed using Kaplan-Meier assays. Finally, a Cox proportional hazards model was carried out to evaluate the prognostic values of TMPO-AS1 and other clinical features. RESULTS We found that TMPO-AS1 was distinctly upregulated in human LSCC tissues compared with corresponding normal specimens (p < 0.01). Higher expressions of TMPO-AS1 were observed to be positively associated with the clinical stage (p = 0.020) and lymph node metastasis (p = 0.027). A clinical study in 187 patients revealed that patients with TMPO-AS1 low expressions had poorer survival than those with TMPO-AS1 high expressions (p = 0.0012). In addition, the result of multivariate assays demonstrated TMPO-AS1 expression is an independent predictor for the overall survival of LSCC patients. CONCLUSIONS TMPO-AS1 might be considered a novel molecule involved in LSCC progression, which provides a possible prognostic biomarker.

The Emerging Role of Thymopoietin-Antisense RNA 1 as Long Noncoding RNA in the Pathogenesis of Human Cancers

“…TMPO-AS1 was reported to be significantly upregulated in various cancers, such as lung cancer (Yu et al, 2020), breast cancer (Mitobe et al, 2020), colorectal cancer (CRC) (Mohammadrezakhani et al, 2020), hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) (Liu and Shen, 2020;Wang et al, 2020), gastric cancer (GC) (Sun and Han, 2020), bladder cancer (He et al, 2020b), laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma (LSCC) (Zhang et al, 2020b), ovarian cancer (Li et al, 2020a;Zhao et al, 2020), thyroid cancer (Li et al, 2020b), esophageal cancer (Gao et al, 2020), Wilms tumor (Zhang et al, 2020a), cervical cancer (Gang et al, 2020), retinoblastoma (Peng et al, 2020), osteosarcoma (Cui and Zhao, 2020), or prostate cancer (Huang et al, 2018), and functions as an oncogene in carcinogenesis and tumor progression. To further investigate the aberrant expression of TMPO-AS1 in various cancers and their associated prognosis, this study applied the Gene Expression Profiling Interactive Analysis (GEPIA) online data analysis tool (Tang et al, 2017).…”

“…In 187 LSCC tumor tissues, TMPO-AS1 was overexpressed compared with nontumor samples. The researchers also explored the relationship between clinical features and TMPO-AS1 expression, and the result indicated that the increase in expression positively correlated with the clinical stage ( p = 0.020) and lymph node metastasis ( p = 0.027), but was not connected with age, gender, tobacco exposure, or tumor differentiation ( p > 0.05) (Zhang et al, 2020b). Patients with high TMPO-AS1 expression had poor prognosis compared with those in the low TMPO-AS1 expression group.…”