LncRNA PCAT6: A potential biomarker for diagnosis and prognosis of bladder cancer

Many potential biomarkers have been identified and studied for bladder cancer diagnosis. In this study, we investigated the role of a new biomarker, long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) PCAT6, in bladder cancer diagnosis and prognosis.

The lncRNA PCAT6 expression profile of BC is analyzed using the Cancer Genome Atlas Urothelial Bladder Carcinoma (TCGA-BLCA) data. PCAT6 expression level in 106 pairs of BC tissues and adjacent normal tissues was detected and compared using qRT-PCR. Then, the association between PCAT6 expression and clinicopathologic indicators of BC was evaluated. Meanwhile, the prognostic value of PCAT6 was tested using Kaplan-Meier analysis. Additionally, loss-of-function assays were used to explore the effect of PCAT6 on the biological function of BC cells. We identified that the expression level of PCAT6 in BC tissue was higher than that in adjacent normal tissues. And the BC patients have higher serum PCAT6 than that in healthy volunteers. In addition, the expression level of PCAT6 was correlated with tumor size (p = 0.005), differentiation (p = 0.018), TNM stage (p = 0.04), lymph nodes metastasis (p = 0.019), and distant metastasis (p = 0.028). Kaplan-Meier analysis showed that BC patients with high PCAT6 expression had shorter overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS). The loss-of-function results revealed that the proliferation and viability of BC cells in PCAT6 knockdown groups decreased significantly, compared with the negative control groups.

Our results demonstrated that PCAT6 might be a potential biomarker for diagnosis and prognosis of BC.