Investigation of expression level of hsa-circ-0001724 and the target gene, CDK6 in patients with gastric cancer

Abstract Background The common feature of cancer cells is the cell cycle instability which is caused by alteration in expression of multiple genes. CDK6 is an important gene in G1 check point of the cell cycle. Therefore, discovering the regulators of CDK6 is a significant therapeutic strategy. This research investigated the expression level of CDK6 and its probable regulator molecule hsa-circ-0001724, in 30 tumor and 30 normal adjacent tissues of gastric cancer. Methods After RNA extraction and cDNA synthesis, the expression levels of CDK6 and hsa-circ-0001724 were measured using Real-time PCR method. Next, the data was analyzed using SPSS and GraphPad prism. The alteration in expression levels between tumor and normal tissues was measured using t-test. The diagnostic values were verified by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. Results CDK6 gene was overexpressed in all tumor tissues compared to adjacent normal tissues and the overexpression was more noticeable in high stages and grades of the cancer. Furthermore, there was a reduction in the expression level of hsa-circ-0001724 in 83.33% of gastric tumor samples compared to normal tissues. The area under the ROC curve of CDK6 and hsa-circ-0001724 were 0.884 (P  Conclusion Consequently, this circRNA may be used as a novel biomarker for gastric cancer diagnosis and follow-up treatment with great sensitivity and specificity.