c-Myc-regulated long non-coding RNA H19 indicates a poor prognosis and affects cell proliferation in non-small-cell lung cancer

Recently, long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been shown to play important roles in human cancer biology. The purpose of this study was to assess the biological role of lncRNA H19 in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Quantitative reverse transcription PCR (qRT-PCR) was used to detect the expression of H19 in tumor tissues and corresponding non-tumor NSCLC tissues from 70 patients. The higher expression of H19 was positively correlated with advanced tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) stage and tumor size. Multivariate analyses found that H19 expression could serve as an independent prognostic factor for overall survival of NSCLC. Moreover, chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assays revealed that H19 was a direct transcriptional target of c-Myc. And, knockdown of H19 significantly inhibited NSCLC cell proliferation both in vitro and in vivo. In conclusion, our study demonstrated that H19 is involved in the oncogenesis of NSCLC, and H19 may be a potential diagnostic and target for new therapies in patients with NSCLC.