Salivary lncRNA as a potential marker for oral squamous cell carcinoma diagnosis

Abstract

Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is a common and lethal malignancy. Thus, improvement in current knowledge of molecular changes associated with OSCC is urgently needed to explore novel avenues of diagnostics and treatment of this disease. While aberrant expression of long non‑coding RNAs (lncRNAs) has been functionally associated with certain types of cancer, including lung, breast and prostate carcinomas, their expression pattern and biological relevance in OSCC is currently unknown. In the present study, the relative abundance of a collection of lncRNAs in tissue or saliva samples from OSCC patients was investigated. It was shown that subsets of lncRNAs are expressed across non‑tumor, tumor and metastatic tissue samples. Some detected lncRNAs were shown to be aberrantly expressed in cases of oral cancer and metastasis. Moreover, whole saliva contained a detectable amount of some lncRNAs, which appeared to be potential markers for OSCC. These findings suggest that the detection of lncRNAs in saliva may be used as a noninvasive and rapid diagnostic tool for the diagnosis of oral cancer.

Transcriptome sequencing uncovers novel long noncoding and small nucleolar RNAs dysregulated in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma

“…We found significant dysregulation of HOTAIR and MEG-3 in oral squamous cell carcinomas, consistent with a prior study by Tang et al (2013); however, in contrast to their report, we observed no significant dysregulation of NEAT-1 or UCA-1. We also found no significant overexpression of UCA-1 in our 13 patients with tongue squamous cell carcinoma (TSCC), although its dysregulation was previously reported by Fang et al (2014).…”

“…Multiple isoforms of GAS5 and MEG-3, lncRNAs previously implicated in HNSCCs (Gee et al 2011;Tang et al 2013), were found to be differentially expressed in our cohort, but with small fold change magnitudes. Several other known cancer-associated lncRNAs have also been implicated in HNSCCs, but most are only limited to tumors arising in certain anatomic sites.…”

“…Similarly, overexpression of the lncRNA MALAT-1 has been linked to hepatocellular carcinoma and metastasis in small-cell lung cancer (Lin et al 2007). Several studies of these well-characterized lncRNAs in HNSCC have revealed promising associations as well, with HOTAIR, MEG-3, MALAT-1, and NEAT-1 each exhibiting dysregulation and/ or prognostic significance in several subtypes of HNSCC (Feng et al 2012;Li et al 2013;Tang et al 2013;Fang et al 2014;Yang and Deng 2014). Additionally, GAS5 (growth arrest specific transcript 5) has been linked to low expression and poor prognosis in HNSCC (Gee et al 2011), and most recently, Shen et al (2014) reported the dysregulation of two relatively uncharacterized transcripts, AC026166.2 and RP11-169D4.1, in LSCCs using microarray and qRT-PCR expression profiling.…”

Salivary Circular RNAs Hsa_Circ_0001874 and Hsa_Circ_0001971 as Novel Biomarkers for the Diagnosis of Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma

“…Salivary screening is currently the best choice as the primary screening test for highrisk cases of OSCC because the collection procedure is noninvasive and low cost [21,22]. Several studies have demonstrated the feasibility of using salivay miRNAs and long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) as potential biomarkers of OSCC [23,24]. CircRNAs are a naturally occurring type of universal and diverse endogenous non-coding RNA.…”

Long noncoding RNAs: emerging players in thyroid cancer pathogenesis

“…HULC is posed as a promising diagnostic biomarker for hepatocellular carcinoma since it has been detected with high frequency in the plasma of HCC patients (Xie et al 2013). In oral cancers, a set of lncRNAs in the saliva were identified as potential markers (Tang et al 2013). Detection of AA174084 in gastric juice was shown to be an indicator of gastric cancer (Shao et al 2014).…”