Circular RNA expression profiles of peripheral blood mononuclear cells in hepatocellular carcinoma patients by sequence analysis

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are a large class of noncoding RNAs that have potential regulatory roles in disease pathogenesis and progression. Recently, circRNAs have been found to be expressed in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) tissues and involved in the development and metastasis of HCC. However, the significance of circRNAs in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) of HCC patients remains unclear. In this study, RNA sequencing analysis was performed to identify circRNAs from four HCC patients and three healthy controls to determine the expression pattern of circRNAs in the PBMCs and the circRNAs’ molecular regulatory networks in HCC pathogenesis. A total of 58 circRNAs were found to be significantly changed (≥2 or ≤0.5‐fold) in the PBMCs of HCC patients compared with those of the healthy cases. Six random representative circRNAs (three up‐ and three down‐regulated) were further validated by real‐time RT‐PCR in 72 samples of PBMCs from HCC patients and 30 control subjects. Chi‐square test indicated that one of the up‐regulated circRNA candidates—circ_0000798—was correlated with clinical variables. Highly expressed circ_0000798 was associated with poor overall survival of HCC patients. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis further revealed that circ_0000798 was discriminating HCC patients from healthy controls. Finally, the predicted competing endogenous RNA network of circ_0000798 showed that it might act as a “sponge” of target microRNAs, that would subsequently regulate the expression of target genes in PBMCs. In summary, this is the first study to comprehensively identify dysregulated circRNAs in PBMCs of HCC patients, and its findings suggest that dysregulated circ_0000798 in PBMCs has potential as a convenient biomarker for diagnosing or prognosticating HCC.