Abstract
Gastric cancer (GC) is the most common gastrointestinal cancer and the main cause of tumor-related death. Exploring markers for early diagnosis and new therapeutic targets is always on the way. In the last 10 years, long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been widely proved to be involved in the progress of many tumors and are regarded as potential targets for tumor therapy. We found that LINC00152, a newly identified lncRNA, was significantly upregulated in GC tissues and affected clinicopathological characteristics in GC patients. Furthermore, we observed that LINC00152 knockdown can significantly reduce cell proliferation and promote apoptosis in human gastric cancer cells. Further bioinformatic analysis indicated that LINC00152 competitively bound with miR-138 and regulated the expression of miR-138. Moreover, SIRT2 was further proved to be a downstream target of miR-138. Overall, this study elucidates the molecular mechanism of LINC00152 underlying the malignant phenotype of GC cells by mediating miR-138/SIRT2 axis, which provides a new understanding of the role and molecular mechanism of lncRNA in GC and also provides a new way for the treatment of gastric cancer.