Elevated BANCR expression levels have different effects on papillary thyroid carcinoma progression depending on the presence of the BRAFV600E mutation.

Introduction: The role of BRAF-activated non-protein coding RNA (BANCR) in papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) is controversial, its clinical significance is unclear and no study has correlated the presence of the BRAFV600E mutation in PTC with BANCR expression.

Methods: BANCR levels in PTC and matched nonmalignant thyroid epithelial tissues from 85 patients were determined using quantitative RT-PCR. BRAFV600E was detected by mutant allele-specific PCR amplification. The results were correlated with clinicopathological characteristics of the patients.

Results: The presence of BRAFV600E associates with lower relative BANCR expression (RBE) in PTC (p = 0.008). RBE is down-regulated in BRAFV600E positive PTC, while it is unchanged or up-regulated in BRAFV600E negative PTC compared to the levels in paired nonmalignant tissue (p = 0.001). At the cut-off of 31.3%, sensitivity of fold change of BANCR for the presence of BRAFV600E is 68.0% and specificity is 67.2%. In BRAFV600E positive PTC up-regulated BANCR predicts lymph node metastasis (p = 0.001), while in BRAFV600E negative PTCs high RBE predicts thyroid capsule invasion (p = 0.028).

Conclusions: Depending on the presence of BRAFV600E, elevated BANCR levels demonstrated different effects on lymphatic spreading and local PTC invasion. Therefore, BANCR could be a useful prognostic biomarker in risk stratification of PTC patients.