Abstract. Bladder cancer is among the most frequent types of genitourinary malignancies and results in high morbidity and mortality. Despite considerable progress in methods of bladder cancer diagnosis and treatment, the detailed underlying molecular mechanisms of bladder cancer remain unclear, and the prognosis of patients remains poor. In the present study, the role of long non-coding (lnc)RNA hepatocyte nuclear factor 1A (HNF1A)-antisense RNA (AS)1 in bladder cancer progression was examined in vitro. HNF1A-AS1 was overexpressed in clinical bladder cancer tissues and cultured bladder cancer cells. Specific short hairpin RNAs against HNF1A-AS1 knocked down the expression of HNF1A-AS1, and thus suppressed the viability and migration/invasion abilities of the cells. Additionally, the depletion of HNF1A-AS1 in bladder cancer T24 and 5637 cell lines also induced cell accumulation in G 0 /G 1 phase with the cell cycle analysis. Overall, these data suggest that lncRNA HNF1A-AS1 may be a potential regulator of bladder cancer tumorigenesis, and provide novel insight into the diagnosis and treatment of bladder cancer.
IntroductionBladder cancer (BC) has the second most frequent incidence of cancers of the genitourinary tract worldwide (1). In 2012 alone, 430,000 incident patients with BC and 165,000 BC-associated mortalities were identified (1). Although advances in treatment have been made in previous decades, the recurrence rate of BC is between 15 and 90% within 5 years, and the 5-year-survival-rate is ~75% (2-5). In total, ~15% of patients with papillary BC develop muscle-invasive and metastatic cancer (3). In these patients, long-term medical care is required, with inevitably high personnel and socioeconomic cost (6). Therefore, it is important to identify novel clues to diagnose and treat BC.With the identification of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), it has been demonstrated that certain lncRNAs may serve important roles in BC (5,7-10). LncRNAs are a category of non-coding RNAs, containing >200 nucleotides with limited translation potential. Unlike other non-coding RNAs, including microRNAs, the underlying molecular mechanisms of different lncRNAs involved in human diseases remain largely unknown. To date, lncRNAs have been demonstrated to participate in multiple intracellular and extracellular activities, including gene transcription, mRNA splicing and tumorigenesis (11)(12)(13)(14)(15). For example, the dysregulation of lncRNAs has been demonstrated in different types of cancer including hepatocellular carcinoma-upregulated lncRNA in hepatocellular carcinoma (16), metastasis-associated lung adenocarcinoma transcript 1 in lung cancer (17) and urothelial cancer-associated 1 and ZEB2 natural antisense transcript in BC (18,19).Unfortunately, despite the increasing implications of lncRNAs in bladder tumorigenesis, no lncRNA has been widely recognized as a specific biomarker for the progression or prognosis of BC. This fact, to a certain extent, encourages focus on novel lncRNAs in BC. Hepatocyte nuclear factor 1A (HNF...