Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 11|pp 10223—10234

Long non-coding RNA SNHG1 activates HOXA1 expression via sponging miR-193a-5p in breast cancer progression

Jun Li¹, Tianyu Zeng¹, Wei Li¹, Hao Wu¹, Chunxiao Sun¹, Fan Yang¹, Mengzhu Yang², Ziyi Fu^1,³, Yongmei Yin¹

¹Department of Oncology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing 210029, China
²Department of Geriatric Oncology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing 210029, China
³Nanjing Maternal and Child Health Medical Institute, Nanjing Maternal and Child Health Care Hospital, Gynecology and Obstetrics Hospital Affiliated to Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing 210029, China

* Equal contribution

Received: September 27, 2019Accepted: March 24, 2020Published: June 3, 2020

Copyright © 2020 Li 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

Breast cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in women worldwide. Long non-coding RNA small nucleolar RNA host gene 1 (SNHG1) has been reported to be involved in human diseases, including cancer. Here, we found that SNHG1 expression was significantly upregulated in human breast cancer tissues and cell lines. We explored the function of SNHG1 in breast cancer cells using in vitro and in vivo experiments and found that SNHG1 promotes breast cancer metastasis and proliferation. The potential molecular mechanism of SNHG1 in breast cancer cells may involve SNHG1 acting as a sponge of miR-193a-5p to activate the expression of the oncogene HOXA1. In summary, our study reveals a novel SNHG1/miR-193a-5p/HOXA1 competing endogenous RNA regulatory pathway in breast cancer progression and may provide new strategies for breast cancer therapy.