This study aimed to investigate the potential role of lncRNA CCAT1 in the progression of pancreatic cancer (PC) and to reveal its possible molecular mechanism. The expression of CCAT1 was analyzed in PC tissues and their adjacent normal tissues from patients diagnosed with PC and in two pancreas cancer cell lines, namely PANC-1 and Aspc-1 using real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) and western blot, respectively. The effects of CCAT1 expression on cell proliferation, cell cycle, and migration were analyzed using MTT assay, flow cytometry, and transwell assay, respectively. The effects of c-Myc expression on the expression of CCAT1 and E-box were also analyzed using RNA immunoprecipitation (RIP) and chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) assays, respectively. The results showed that CCAT1 was highly expressed in PC tissues compared to the adjacent tissues (P<0.01) and was also overexpressed in PANC-1 and Aspc-1 cells (P<0.05). The silencing of CCAT1 significantly inhibited cell proliferation and migration (P<0.05), arrested cell cycle at G0/G1 stage, and decreased cyclin D1 expression (P<0.05). An increased expression of c-Myc was observed in the PC tissues compared to the adjacent tissues. We found that suppression of c-Myc altered CCAT1 expression by targeting its promoter at E-box. This study demonstrated that c-Myc-activated CCAT1 may contribute to tumorigenesis and metastasis of PC, which may serve as a potential target for the therapy of PC.
Keywords: Pancreatic cancer; c-Myc; cell proliferation; lncRNA CCAT1; metastasis.