Overexpression of long non-coding RNA CRNDE facilitates epithelial-mesenchymal transition and correlates with poor prognosis in intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma

The clinical significance and essential role of long non-coding RNA colorectal neoplasia differentially expressed (lncRNA CRNDE) have been well illuminated in various cancers. However, the function of CRNDE in intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (IHCC) has not been reported at present. The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of CRNDE in IHCC. Firstly, the relative expression of CRNDE was observed to be upregulated in IHCC cell lines and tissues. And high CRNDE expression was statistically associated with IHCC differentiation grade, lymph node metastasis, tumor-nodes-metastasis (TNM) stage and size. Survival analysis identified that high CRNDE expression is a predictor of worse overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS) in patients with IHCC. Moreover, high CRNDE expression was identified as an independent risk factor of IHCC poor OS and PFS. Further studies of in vitro assays suggested that CRNDE silencing could suppress the proliferation of HuCCT1 cells following CCK-8 and colony formation assays, while CRNDE ectopic expression in HCCC9810 cells promoted proliferation. Moreover, the migration and invasion of HuCCT1 cells were greatly repressed with CRNDE deficiency following Transwell and Matrigel assays. Accordingly, the motility of HCCC9810 cells was notably accelerated with CRNDE overexpression. Mechanistically, CRNDE was revealed to facilitate the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) of IHCC cells. In conclusion, these observations indicated that CRNDE could promote the clinical progression and metastasis of IHCC by facilitating EMT. CRNDE may be a novel prognostic marker and therapeutic target in IHCC.