DNAJC3-AS1 Is Associated with Proliferation, Metastasis, and Poor Prognosis of Breast Cancer.

OBJECTIVE

Long noncoding RNA DNAJC3-AS1 (DNAJC3-AS1) was a newly identified tumor-related lncRNA. The aim of the present study was to explore the prognostic value and diagnostic of DNAJC3-AS1 (DNAJC3-AS1) expression in breast cancer (BC) patients. . The expression of DNAJC3-AS1 was detected in 170 BC tissues and matched normal breast samples by qRT-PCR. The diagnostic value of DNAJC3-AS1 was examined by receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) assays. The correlation of DNAJC3-AS1 with clinicopathological features and prognosis was also statistically analyzed. CCK-8 assays, colony formation assays, and Transwell assays were applied to examine the potential function of DNAJC3-AS1 on tumor progression. Western blot was used to examine the expression of EMT-related proteins.

RESULTS

The expression of DNAJC3-AS1 in BC specimens was higher than that in the adjacent nontumor tissues ( < 0.01). Diagnostic assays revealed that DNAJC3-AS1 has considerable diagnostic accuracy, with an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.7457 ( < 0.001). High DNAJC3-AS1 expression was positively associated with lymph node metastasis ( = 0.010) and clinical stage ( = 0.023). A survival study revealed that patients with high DNAJC3-AS1 expression had shorter overall survival ( = 0.0067) and disease-free survival ( < 0.0001) than those with low DNAJC3-AS1 expression. More importantly, multivariate assays indicated that DNAJC3-AS1 was an independent prognostic factor in BC patients. Functional assays confirmed that silence of DNAJC3-AS1 distinctly suppressed the proliferation, metastasis, and EMT progress of BC cells.

CONCLUSIONS

DNAJC3-AS1 may be a prognostic and diagnostic biomarker for BC patients.