Abstract
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a leading cause of cancer death in many Asian and African countries. Lack of early diagnosis tools is one of the clinical obstacles for effective treatment of HCC. Thus, enhanced understanding of the molecular changes associated with HCC is urgently needed to develop novel strategies for the diagnosis and treatment of this dismal disease. While aberrant expression of long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) has been functionally associated with certain cancers, the expression profiles and biological relevance of lncRNAs in HCC remain unclear. Highly upregulated in liver cancer (HULC) lncRNA has been implicated in the regulation of hepatoma cell proliferation. In this study, we demonstrate that HULC expression is significantly higher in HCC tumors compared to normal liver tissues. Among the tumor tissues, higher HULC expression is positively associated with Edmondson histological grades or with hepatitis B (HBV) positive status. Moreover, HULC lncRNA is detected with higher frequency in the plasma of HCC patients compared to healthy controls. Higher HULC detection rates are observed in the plasma of patients with higher Edmondson grades or with HBV+ status. These findings indicate for the first time that the expression of HULC in plasma can be used as a noninvasive promising novel biomarker for the diagnosis and/or prognosis of HCC.
Highlights
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a leading cause of cancer death in many Asian and African countries [1, 2]
To determine the reaction efficiencies, standard curves were created using the qPCR results of serial dilutions of Hep3B cDNA which serves as a positive control for Highly upregulated in liver cancer (HULC) expression
The results showed that the expression levels of HULC were markedly increased in HCC tissues compared to normal liver specimens (P < 0.01) (Figure 1(b))
Summary
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a leading cause of cancer death in many Asian and African countries [1, 2]. HCC causes estimated 662,000 deaths each year worldwide (“Cancer” World Health Organization), and about half of them occur in China. They can be small and slow growing, HCC tumors can be successfully treated by aggressive surgery, patients often lose the window for surgical resection due to the lack of effective tools for early diagnosis which results in very low 5-year survival rates. To improve the prognosis of HCC, it is important and critical to develop specific and sensitive diagnostic biomarkers for HCC. NcRNAs play important regulatory roles in the development and progression of many diseases including cancers [3, 4]
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