Deleted in lymphocytic leukemia 2 (DLEU2): An lncRNA with dissimilar roles in different cancers

Abstract Deleted in lymphocytic leukemia 2" (DLEU2) is a long non-coding transcript with several splice variants. It has been identified through a comprehensive sequencing of a commonly deleted region in leukemia i.e. the 13q14 region. Afterwards, different investigations reported up-regulation of this long non-coding RNA in several types of cancers. Up-regulation of DLEU2 has been shown to determine poor survival in esophageal, pancreatic, laryngeal, renal, cervical and lung cancers. However, the diagnostic power of DLUE2 has only assessed in two studies; only one them exhibiting promising results. A limitation of most of studies is that they did not differentiate between transcript variants of this lncRNA. Therefore, it is not possible to attribute the observed functions to a certain alternate transcript. In this manuscript, we discuss the results of these studies in three different sections based on the type of experiments.