Late recurrence-associated long non-coding RNA NR2F1 antisense 1 (NR2F1-AS1)

Long non-coding RNA NR2F1 antisense RNA1 (lncRNA NR2F1-AS1) was identified as the main candidate associated to late recurrence in ER-positive breast cancer clinical samples. Gain-of-function of NR2F1-AS1 induced the expression of dormancy-inducers BMP4 and DEC2, and upregulated pluripotency markers NANOG and OCT4. Representative pathways entailed to metastatic events such as HER2/Neu, hypoxia, EMT and inflammatory-response were also found enriched. Applied microarray-based analysis to 24 ER-positive breast cancer clinical specimens. The clinical specimens were selected from ER-positive breast cancer patients who did not receive any treatment previously to the needle-biopsy and developed distant metastases 10 years after the initial diagnosis. Same criteria were applied for ER-positive breast cancer specimens from patients with no signs of distant metastases after 10 years. We successfully identified the lncRNA NR2F1 antisense RNA1 (NR2F1-AS1) as a main lncRNA linked to recurrence. Clinical samples were gifted from the National Cancer Center Hospital of Japan (Tsukiji, Tokyo, Japan).