Highly expressed TLX1NB and NPSR1-AS1 lncRNAs could serve as diagnostic tools in colorectal cancer.

ABSTRACT

Colorectal cancer is the main cause of human death due to cancer. This fact could be due to the insufficiency of early diagnosis or poor therapeutic strategies. Various molecular tools have been utilized in studies to assess their potentials as diagnostic biomarkers or determining factors in precision medicine. Among these molecules, long non-coding RNAs (lncRNA) have been emerging as accurate and potent transcripts to improve the detection of cancer. The overexpressed lncRNAs could also be deeply studied as the molecules for the targeted therapy in different malignancies, in particular colorectal cancer. Thus, we utilized an unbiased approach to select the up-regulated lncRNAs in colon adenocarcinoma via analyzing the TCGA dataset. Then, we validated the overexpression of two first-ranked lncRNAs, i.e., NPSR1-AS1 and TLX1NB, in our in-house colorectal cancer samples as compared to the paired adjacent normal tissues. The analyses revealed that these lncRNAs could significantly distinguish the tumor against the normal samples. The results may have implications in the early diagnosis and targeted therapy of colorectal cancer.