Expression of lncRNA FGD5-AS1 correlates with poor prognosis in melanoma patients.

Abstract

Growing evidence demonstrates that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) play an important role in cancer origination and progression. A novel identified lncRNA, FGD5 antisense RNA 1 (FGD5-AS1), was reported to be overexpressed in several tumors. The present study aimed to investigate the expression of FGD5-AS1 in melanoma and its associations with clinical prognosis in melanoma patients. The expression levels of FGD5-AS1 in 188 pairs of melanoma specimens and matched non-tumor specimens were determined using a real-time polymerase chain reaction. A chi-squared test was performed to determine the relationship between FGD5-AS1 levels and clinicopathological features. The overall survival rates of melanoma patients based on the expression of FGD5-AS1 were calculated by the Kaplan-Meier method with a log-rank test. Finally, univariate and multivariate assays were carried out to determine whether FGD5-AS1 was a prognostic factor in melanoma patients. We observed that FGD5-AS1 in melanoma specimens was distinctly up-regulated compared to adjacent non-tumor specimens (p < 0.01). In malignant cases, higher expression of FGD5-AS1 was prominently associated with tumor thickness (p = 0.024) and advanced tumor stage (p = 0.039). The data from our clinical study revealed that patients with high FGD5-AS1 expression had a distinctly shorter overall survival (p = 0.0034) and disease-free survival (p < 0.0001) than those with low FGD5-AS1 expression. Multivariate analysis demonstrated that high FGD5-AS1 expression may serve as a potential independent prognostic factor in melanoma. FGD5-AS1 may act as a prognostic predictor and a possible drug-target for melanoma patients.