Long Intergenic Noncoding RNA Promotes Ovarian Cancer Growth by Modulating Apoptosis-Related Gene Expression.

Patients with advanced ovarian cancer usually exhibit high mortality rates, thus more efficient therapeutic strategies are expected to be developed. Recent transcriptomic studies revealed that long intergenic noncoding RNAs (lincRNAs) can be a new class of molecular targets for cancer management, because lincRNAs likely exert tissue-specific activities compared with protein-coding genes or other noncoding RNAs. We here show that an unannotated lincRNA originated from chromosome 10q21 and designated as (), is often overexpressed in ovarian cancer tissues compared with normal ovaries as analyzed by RNA sequencing. silencing by specific siRNAs significantly exerted proliferation inhibition and enhanced apoptosis in ovarian cancer cells. Notably, RNA sequencing showed that expression was negatively correlated with the expression of apoptosis-related genes () and (), which were upregulated by knockdown in ovarian cancer cells. -specifc siRNA injection was effective to suppress in vivo tumor growth of ovarian cancer cells inoculated in immunodeficient mice. Taken together, could function as a tumor-promoting lincRNA in ovarian cancer through modulating apoptosis and will be a potential molecular target for ovarian cancer management.