Increased expression of long intergenic non-coding RNA LINC00152 in gastric cancer and its clinical significance

It has been known that differential expression of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) plays critical roles in carcinogenesis. However, the significance of lncRNA, especially long intergenic ncRNA (lincRNA, the main type of lncRNA family), in the diagnosis of gastric cancer is largely unknown. The aim of this study was to determine the expression level of LINC00152, a newfound lincRNA, in gastric carcinoma and its clinical association. The expression of LINC00152 in 71 pairs of tumorous and adjacent normal tissues from patients with gastric cancer was detected by quantitative real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction. And then, the potential associations between its level in gastric cancer tissue and the clinicopathological features were analyzed. Finally, a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was constructed for differentiating patients with gastric cancer from patients with benign gastric diseases. The results showed that the expression level of LINC00152 in gastric carcinoma was significantly increased, compared with matched normal tissue (P = 0.045) and normal mucosa from health control (P = 0.004), respectively. Levels of LINC00152 in gastric cancer cell lines, BGC-823, MGC-803, and SGC-7901, were significantly higher than those in human normal gastric epithelial cell line GES-1. In addition, high expression of LINC00152 was correlated with invasion (P = 0.042). LINC00152 levels in gastric juice from patients with gastric cancer were further found significantly higher than those from normal controls (P = 0.002). Moreover, the area under the ROC curve (AUC) was up to 0.645 (95 % CI = 0.559-0.740, P = 0.003). This study highlights that lincRNA LINC00152 might be a novel biomarker for predicting gastric cancer.