Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 7|pp 9900—9910

LncRNA MNX1-AS1 drives aggressive laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma progression and serves as a ceRNA to target FoxM1 by sponging microRNA-370

Xiangyan Cui¹, Hong Yu¹, Tingting Yu¹, Dong Xiao¹, Xin Wang¹

¹Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, The First Hospital of Jilin University, Changchun 130021, China

* Equal contribution

Received: November 2, 2020Accepted: February 9, 2021Published: March 19, 2021

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202746

Copyright: © 2021 Cui 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

Long non-coding RNA (LncRNA) MNX1 antisense RNA 1(MNX1-AS1) is associated with the pathology of numerous cancers. But, the role and underlying pathways of MNX1-AS1 in the regulation of laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma (LSCC) is not known. We demonstrated remarkably elevated levels of MNX1-AS1 in the LSCC tissues, which was correlated with poor disease prognosis. Moreover, MNX1-AS1-silencing strongly suppressed LSCC cell proliferation, migration, and invasion. We also demonstrated that MNX1-AS1 sequesters that activity of miR-370, thereby releasing Forkhead Box ml (FoxM1) from the inhibitory actions of MNX1-AS1. Furthermore, the positive correlation of MNX1-AS1 and FoxM1 as well as the converse correlation between miR-370 and MNX1-AS1 (or FoxM1) were revealed in LSCC tissues using experiments. Based on rescue assays, FoxM1 overexpression or miR-370 downregulation partially recovered the inhibitory effect of MNX1-AS1 silencing on LSCC cells. Moreover, knockdown of MNX1-AS1 retarded tumor growth in nude mice model. In summary, these findings verified that MNX1-AS1 modulated LSCC progression by competitively binding with miR-370 to regulate FoxM1.