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Updated: Jan 23, 2026

A "Patient-Like" Orthotopic Syngeneic Mouse Model of Hepatocellular Carcinoma Metastasis
Published on: October 24, 2015
Tumor-Specific Transcripts Are Frequently Expressed in Hepatocellular Carcinoma With Clinical Implication and
Qiupeng Zheng1,2, Jingjing Zhao1, Hui Yu2,3
1Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center, Key Laboratory of Medical Epigenetics and Metabolism, Institutes of Biomedical Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
Abstract:
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a highly lethal cancer and its underlying etiology remains understudied. The immense diversity and complexity of the cancer transcriptome hold the potential to yield tumor-specific transcripts (TSTs). Here, we showed that hundreds of TSTs are frequently expressed in HCC by an assembling spliced junction analysis of RNA sequencing raw data from approximately 1,000 normal and HCC tissues. Many of the TSTs were found to be unannotated and noncoding RNAs. We observed that intergenic TSTs are generated from transcription initiation sites frequently harboring long terminal repeat (LTR) elements. The strong presence of TSTs indicates significantly poor prognoses in HCC. Functional screening revealed a noncoding TST (termed TST1), which acted as a regulator of HCC cell proliferation and tumorigenesis. TST1 is generated from an LTR12C promoter regulated by DNA methylation and retinoic-acid-related drugs. Additionally, we observed that TSTs may be detected in the blood extracellular vesicles of patients with HCC. Conclusion: Our findings suggest an abundance of TSTs in HCC and their potential in clinical settings. The identification and characterization of TSTs may help toward the development of strategies for cancer diagnosis and treatment.
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