Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 18|pp 18019—18032

Long non-coding RNA AGAP2-AS1 increases the invasiveness of papillary thyroid cancer

Liang Shao¹, Wei Sun¹, Hao Zhang¹, Ping Zhang¹, Zhihong Wang¹, Wenwu Dong¹, Liang He¹, Ting Zhang¹, Yuan Qin¹

¹Department of Thyroid Surgery, The First Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang 110001, Liaoning Province, P. R. China

Received: March 25, 2020Accepted: June 5, 2020Published: September 18, 2020

Copyright: © 2020 Shao et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) is considered a low hazard endocrine system cancer, but a considerable number of patients have poor prognosis because of lymph node metastasis and invasion of surrounding tissues. In this study, we analyzed the expression and function of the long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) AGAP2-AS1 in PTC. We found that AGAP2-AS1 expression was significantly higher in human PTC tissues than adjacent noncancerous tissues (n=110; p<0.01) and correlated with lymph node metastasis (p=0.01) and tumor-node-metastasis stage (p=0.006). AGAP2-AS1 downregulation decreased migration and invasion by PTC cells, and reduced expression of matrix metalloproteinase-2 (MMP2). AGAP2-AS1 upregulated MMP2 expression by competitively binding to microRNA-425-5p. In addition, miR-424-5p expression was decreased in PTC tissues and correlates negatively with the AGAP2-AS1 levels. These results demonstrate that AGAP2-AS1 expression is significantly elevated in PTC tissues and that, by binding to miRNA-425-5p, it upregulates the MMP2 expression, thereby increasing the invasiveness and migration capacity of PTC cells.