Cancer is expected to rank as the leading cause of death worldwide due to increasing morbidity and mortality. Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been found to play pivotal roles in multiple biological processes, such as transcriptional interference, posttranscriptional regulation and epigenetic modification. Small nucleolar RNA host gene 15 (SNHG15), a snoRNA host gene which produces a short half-lived lncRNA, was reported to be upregulated in tumor cells and participate in the occurrence and development of multiple cancers. And more than half of the SNHG15 research in cancers has been published within the last 2 years. In this review, we summarized the current evidence concerning the biological functions and molecular mechanisms of SNHG15 in various cancers, including gastric, hepatocellular, pancreatic, colorectal, breast, and thyroid cancer, osteosarcoma, glioma, lung cancer, renal cell carcinoma, and epithelial ovarian cancer. SNHG15 plays critical roles in regulation of cell proliferation, migration and invasion of tumors via different potential mechanisms. Moreover, the abnormal expression of SNHG15 was associated with clinical features of patients with cancers. Consequently, SNHG15 could be considered as a promising biomarker for cancer diagnosis, prognosis or treatment.
Keywords: SNHG15; biomarker; cancer; long noncoding RNA.