Aging
Navigate
Submit an Article
Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 15|pp 15581—15602

hsa_circRNA6448-14 promotes carcinogenesis in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma

Yaowen Zhang1,2, Xiang Yuan3, Ning Yue4, Lidong Wang2, Junqi Liu2, Ningtao Dai1, Haijun Yang1, Ruitai Fan2, Fuyou Zhou1
  • 1Department of Radiation Oncology, Anyang Cancer Hospital, Anyang 455000, China
  • 2Department of Radiation Oncology, Henan Key Laboratory for Cancer Research, The first Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou 450000, China
  • 3Henan 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
  • 4Department of Radiation Oncology, Rutgers - Cancer Institute of New Jersey, Rutgers - Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, New Brunswick, NJ 08903, USA
Received: March 24, 2020Accepted: June 19, 2020Published: August 15, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.103650

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.