Long non-coding RNA PVT1 as a novel potential biomarker for predicting the prognosis of colorectal cancer.

Background: Long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) plays a very important role in the occurrence and development of various tumors, and is a potential biomarker for cancer diagnosis and prognosis. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between the expression of lncRNA plasmacytoma variant translocation 1 (PVT1) and the prognostic significance in patients with colorectal cancer.

Methods: The expression of PVT1 was measured by real-time quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) in cancerous and adjacent tissues of 210 colorectal cancer patients. The disease-free survival and overall survival of colorectal cancer patients were evaluated by Kaplan-Meier analysis, and univariate and multivariate analysis were performed by Cox proportional-hazards model.

Results: Our results revealed that PVT1 expression in cancer tissues of colorectal cancer was significantly higher than that of adjacent tissues (<0.001). High PVT1 expression was increased by 51.4% (108/210), which was significantly correlated with the tumor differentiation, the depth of invasion, the stage of tumor, node, metastasis (TNM), and lymphatic metastasis. The Kaplan-Meier analysis showed that high PVT1 expression resulted in a shorter disease-free survival (Log-rank test <0.001) and overall survival (Log-rank test <0.001) compared with the low PVT1 expression group in colorectal cancer patients, whether at TNM I/II stage or at TNM III/IV stage. A multivariate Cox regression analysis demonstrated that high PVT1 expression was an independent predictor of poor prognosis in colorectal cancer patients.

Conclusions: Our results suggest that high PVT1 expression might be a potential biomarker for assessing tumor recurrence and prognosis in colorectal cancer patients.