Assessment of circulating HISLA as a potential biomarker for breast cancer diagnosis and prognosis

Breast cancer (BC) is the most frequently encountered and aggressive type of malignant tumor and affects the health of females across the globe. Approximately 30% of patients that are newly diagnosed have a high risk of subsequent metastasis and relapse. HIF-1α-stabilizing long noncoding RNA (HISLA) packaged in exosome has been recently identified and revealed as an important oncogenic gene in promoting BC progress. Thus, we sought to investigate whether serum circulating HISLA was involved in dynamics underlying its applicability for the diagnosis and prognosis of BC. We assessed serum HISLA expression in 40 patients with BC and 20 healthy controls to investigate its roles in BC using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). We also assessed measures of correlation of clinical and pathological parameters with prognoses of BC patients. Our findings suggested that serum HISLA expression in BC patients was significantly higher than in healthy controls. Furthermore, high expression of serum HISLA was positively associated with advanced stage lymph node metastasis. Expression of HISLA was reduced in postoperative BC patients’ serum samples, compared with preoperative serum samples. Pearson correlation assessments indicated significant correlation between serum HISLA expression and the tissue sample HISLA expression in BC patients. Our findings suggested that serum HISLA may serve as newfound biomarker which could help to improve diagnoses and prognoses for BC-afflicted patients.