lncRNAs PVT1 and HAR1A are prognosis biomarkers and indicate therapy outcome for diffuse glioma patients

Diffuse gliomas are well known malignant brain tumors. Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), a type of RNA transcript with more than 200 nucleotides, involve in tumorigenesis and development of various cancers. This study focused on identifying differentially expressed lncRNAs in gliomas based on gene expression profiling, and chose certain lncRNAs PVT1, CYTOR, HAR1A and MIAT, which changed with significant differences. Further analysis of TCGA and GEO data revealed that the expressions of PVT1 and CYTOR were up-regulated, while HAR1A and MIAT expressions were down-regulated in gliomas. Their expression patterns were validated in an independent cohort containing 98 glioma specimens and 12 non-tumor tissue controls. High expression of PVT1 and CYTOR as well as low HAR1A and MIAT expression were associated with high Ki-67 level and more TP53 mutation. Kaplan-Meier survival curve and Cox regression analyses showed that glioma patients with high PVT1 expression or low HAR1A expression had poor survival outcome, aberrantly expressed PVT1 and HAR1A could be the independent prognosis biomarkers for glioma patients. Moreover, down-regulation of PVT1 and up-regulation of HAR1A contributed to improve the survival of patients who received chemotherapy and radiotherapy. These results implied that these four lncRNAs might play important role in diffuse gliomas progression, particularly, PVT1 and HAR1A could be explored as promising biomarkers for diagnosis, prognosis and target therapy of diffuse gliomas.