NF-κB-mediated lncRNA AC007271.3 promotes carcinogenesis of oral squamous cell carcinoma by regulating miR-125b-2-3p/Slug.

Oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is the most common oral cancer. The molecular mechanisms of this disease are not fully understood. Our previous studies confirmed that dysregulated function of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) AC007271.3 was associated with a poor prognosis and overexpression of AC007271.3 promoted cell proliferation, migration, invasion, and inhibited cell apoptosis in vitro, and promoted tumor growth in vivo. However, the underlying mechanisms of AC007271.3 dysregulation remained obscure. In this study, our investigation showed that AC007271.3 functioned as competing endogenous RNA by binding to miR-125b-2-3p and by destabilizing primary miR-125b-2, resulted in the upregulating expression of Slug, which is a direct target of miR-125b-2-3p. Slug also inhibited the expression of E-cadherin but N-cadherin, vimentin, and β-catenin had no obvious change. The expression of AC007271.3 was promoted by the canonical nuclear factor-κB (NF-κB) pathway. Taken together, these results suggested that the classical NF-κB pathway-activated AC007271.3 regulates EMT by miR-125b-2-3p/Slug/E-cadherin axis to promote the development of OSCC, implicating it as a novel potential target for therapeutic intervention in this disease.