lncRNA FBXL19-AS1 is a diagnosis biomarker for paediatric patients with acute myeloid leukemia

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNA) have emerged as novel clinical biomarkers and therapeutic targets for various tumors because of their disease- and stage-restricted expression. lncRNA FBXL19 antisense RNA 1 (FBXL19-AS1) expression has been confirmed to be up-regulated in several tumors. However, its expression and effects in paediatric acute myeloid leukemia (AML) have not been elucidated.

Serum FBXL19-AS1 expression was determined in 137 AML patients compared to 43 healthy controls ( < 0.01).

Using receiver operating characteristic curve analysis, we observed that serum FBXL19-AS1 provided the highly diagnostic performance for the detection of AML (AUC = 0.841, < 0.001). We also examined the association between serum FBXL19-AS1 expression and clinicopathological factors, finding that its high expression was associated with French-American-British classification ( = 0.011) and cytogenetics ( = 0.021). Survival assays with the Kaplan-Meier method revealed that the overall survival ( = 0.0088) and disease-free-survival ( = 0.0027) of AML patients with high serum FBXL19-AS1 levels were distinctly shorter compared to those with low serum FBXL19-AS1 levels. More importantly, Multivariate analysis identified serum FBXL19-AS1 overexpression as an independent unfavorable prognostic factor for both overall survival and disease-free-survival of AML patients.

Overall, our findings revealed that high expression of serum FBXL19-AS1 might be useful as a novel prognostic and diagnostic biomarker for AML patients.