Inflammatory long noncoding RNAs NKILA but not PACER is down-regulated in patients with pancreatic cancer: A pilot study

Pancreatic cancer (PC) is a highly deadly malignancy, due to late diagnosis and inadequate treatment. Therefore, potential diagnostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets are needed for PC patients. Today, long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) are used as new biomarkers in diagnosing and treating cancers. Hence, we studied the expression levels of inflammatory lncRNAs, NKILA, and PACER in the peripheral blood mononuclear cells of PC patients and healthy individuals. The expression level of lncRNA NKILA was significantly reduced in patients. However, no significant difference was observed in the expression level of lncRNA PACER in the cases compared to healthy subjects. In addition, significant pairwise correlations were indicated between expression levels of these lncRNAs in PC patients. Finally, the area under curve values for NKILA was 0.72. The current pilot results suggest that NKILA might serve as a diagnostic biomarker for discrimination between PC patients and controls. Altogether, the observed down-regulation of lncRNA NKLA in PC cases compared with the healthy controls ensures future functional studies to affirm the results of the present study in larger sample sizes to elaborate its putative role as PC biomarkers.