Circulation long non-coding RNAs act as biomarkers for predicting tumorigenesis and metastasis in hepatocellular carcinoma

BACKGROUND & AIMS: Alpha Fetal Protein (AFP) was one of the traditional biomarker for diagnosis of Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) clinically, however, with the low specificity of AFP, the early diagnosis or the metastasis prediction of HCC is inferior. A new, minimally invasive and more specificity biomarker for the diagnosis or metastasis prediction of HCC are necessary. METHODS: In this study, we applied an lncRNA microarray to screen the potential biomarker for HCC. The multi-stage validation and risk score formula detection was used for validation. RESULTS: We discovered three lncRNA, RP11–160H22.5, XLOC_014172 and LOC149086, which were up-regulated in HCC comparing with the cancer-free controls with the merged area under curve (AUC) in training set and validation set of 0.999 and 0.896. Furthermore, XLOC_014172 and LOC149086 was confirmed highly increased in metastasis HCC patients with the merged AUC in training set and validation set of 0.900 and 0.934. Besides, most patients presented a decreased level of the three lncRNAs after operation, while the patients with secondary increased level might be associated with tumor hematogenous metastasis. CONCLUSIONS: RP11–160H22.5, XLOC_014172 and LOC149086 might be the potential biomarker for the tumorigenesis prediction and XLOC_014172 and LOC149086 for metastasis prediction in the future.