LncRNA ABHD11-AS1 Elevates CALM2 to Promote Metastasis of Thyroid Cancer Through Sponging miR-876-5p

In the past decade, the treatment of thyroid cancer (TC) has been brought to a new era, but tumor metastasis still is an intractable difficulty in clinical. LncRNA ABHD11-AS1 has been confirmed to be involved in TC progression. However, its specific mechanism remains unknown. Tissues from TC patients and TC cells served as mainly experimental subjects in this study. The migration of TC cells was assessed using the scratch assay, and the ability of cell invasion was evaluated by transwell assay. RT-qPCR and western blot were conducted to determine the levels of related genes and proteins. The dual-luciferase reporter assay was used to validate the relationships among ABHD11-AS1, miR-876-5p and CALM2. ABHD11-AS1 and CALM2 are elevated in TC cancer samples and cells, while the expression of miR-876-5p is reduced. Subsequently, the ability of TC cells to migrate, invade and EMT was inhibited by both ABHD11-AS1 knockdown or miR-876-5p overexpression. Moreover, the suppression of malignant characteristics in TC cells resulting from ABHD11-AS knockdown was counteracted by the inhibition of miR-876-5p or the upregulation of CALM2. On the mechanism, ABHD11-AS1 elevated CALM2 and promoted the malignant development of TC cells by acting as a miR-876-5p sponge. ABHD11-AS1 mediated the miR-876-5p/CALM2 axis to drive the metastasis of thyroid cancer.