Up-regulation of inflammation-related LncRNA-IL7R predicts poor clinical outcome in patients with cervical cancer

Abstract

The long-term chronic inflammation of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) induces the initiation and progression of cervical cancer. Long non-coding RNAs (LncRNAs) are being identified to be involved into inflammation and carcinogenesis and could function as cancer biomarkers in clinical. However, the significance of inflammation-related LncRNA (e.g. LncRNA-IL7R) in cervical cancer is limited. We, here, investigated the clinical role of inflammation-related LncRNA-IL7R (Lnc-IL7R) in healthy cervical tissue (n=15), CIN 1/2/3 (n=35), cervical cancer (n=70), and clarified its function via knockdown in vitro and in vivo. The results showed that the expression of Lnc-IL7R was increased from normal tissues to neoplastic lesions and cervical cancer. Up-regulated Lnc-IL7R positively correlated to tumor size, International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics (FIGO) stage, and lymph node metastasis (LNM). Patients with high expression of Lnc-IL7R had poor prognosis with short overall survival (OS) time, and Cox regression analysis revealed that Lnc-IL7R could be independent prognostic factor for cervical cancer. Moreover, knockdown of Lnc-IL7R by two different siRNAs in cervical cancer cell lines Hela and SiHa induced impaired cell vitality and caspase-3-dependent apoptosis in vitro. Furthermore, inhibition of Lnc-IL7R in vivo significantly restricted the tumor growth with decreased expressions of proliferation index Ki-67 and Lnc-IL7R. These data indicated that Lnc-IL7R predicts a poor clinical outcome of cervical cancer patients, and knockdown of Lnc-IL7R is amenable to the treatment of cervical cancer.