EXPLORING ROLES OF MIR-372-3P IN PROLIFERATION OF HEPATOCELLULAR CARCINOMA CELLS

Abstract

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common type of primary liver cancer, and it has been considered as the second leading cause of cancer-related death. Many factors were shown to be associated with HCC development such as hepatitis virus infection, alcohol consumption, and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). As well as the other types of cancer, HCC also shares a typical cancer hallmark including indefinite proliferation, avoiding growth suppressers, and activation of replicative immortality. In addition, cell cycle-related protein regulating proliferation in cancer are often found dysregulated, allowing cancer cells to proceed their proliferation uncontrollably. Recently, a small non-coding RNA, microRNA (miRNA), was found to play an important role in numerous biological functions. A particular miRNA may ameliorate or promote cancer progression through different target mRNA, suppressing translation into protein. MiR-372-3p has been widely explored in various cancers such as colon cancer, colorectal cancer, and glioma. However, its functions have been rarely explored in HCC, especially in the aspect of cancer proliferation. This study, thus, aims to investigate its role of in HCC cell line proliferation by introducing vector containing miR-372-3p sequence to these cell lines and evaluating their proliferation activity, respectively. The preliminary results indicated that normal hepatocyte cell line exhibited lower expression of miR-372-3p compared to HCC cell lines. Moreover, decelerated proliferation rate was found in transduced HCC cell lines compared to control.