Research Paper Volume 12, Issue 15 pp 15581—15602
hsa_circRNA6448-14 promotes carcinogenesis in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma
- 1 Department of Radiation Oncology, Anyang Cancer Hospital, Anyang 455000, China
- 2 Department of Radiation Oncology, Henan Key Laboratory for Cancer Research, The first Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou 450000, China
- 3 Henan Key Laboratory of Cancer Epigenetics, Cancer Institute, The First Affiliated Hospital and College of Clinical Medicine of Henan University of Science and Technology, Luoyang 471000, China
- 4 Department of Radiation Oncology, Rutgers - Cancer Institute of New Jersey, Rutgers - Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, New Brunswick, NJ 08903, USA
Received: March 24, 2020 Accepted: June 19, 2020 Published: August 15, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.103650How to Cite
Copyright © 2020 Zhang 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
Circular RNAs (circRNAs) play important roles in cancer progression. hsa_circRNA6448-14 originates from exon 5 to exon 11 of the TGFBI gene. We investigated the roles of hsa_circRNA6448-14 in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) with microarrays and quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR), Kaplan-Meier analysis, loss-of-function and gain-of-function assays, and pull-down assays for miRNA binding. The hsa_circRNA6448-14-miRNA-mRNA network was drawn using Circos. hsa_circRNA6448-14 was significantly upregulated in ESCC tissues and cell lines. As a diagnostic biomarker, hsa_circRNA6448-14 had an area under the curve (AUC), sensitivity, and specificity of 0.906, 82.9%, and 85.5%, respectively. hsa_circRNA6448-14 upregulation was correlated with poor differentiation, advanced pTNM stage, poor disease-free survival (DFS), and poor overall survival (OS). Elevated hsa_circRNA6448-14 promoted cell proliferation, migration, invasion, and inhibited apoptosis in vitro. hsa_circRNA6448-14 functioned as a miRNA sponge to competitively bind miR-455-3p, and hsa_circRNA6448-14 expression negatively correlated with that of miR-455-3p. hsa_circRNA6448-14 promoted carcinogenesis in ESCC, suggesting that hsa_circRNA6448-14 could serve as a diagnostic and prognostic biomarker for ESCC.