Analysis of lncRNA expression profiles in non-small cell lung cancers (NSCLC) and their clinical subtypes

Lung cancer is one of the most common human cancers worldwide. Among all lung cancer cases, non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) accounts for approximately 85%. Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are non-protein-coding transcripts that have been shown to play important roles in tumourigenesis and tumor progression. To reveal novel tumor-related lncRNAs in NSCLC and their associations with clinical subtypes, we herein identified 2935 probe sets mapped to lncRNAs on Affymetrix HG-U133 Plus 2.0 array with an lncRNA classification pipeline. We found 47 lncRNAs differentially expressed between normal lung tissues and tumor samples and 19 lncRNAs differed in expression between SCC and AC, two subtypes of NSCLC, after analyses of the gene expression profiles of five datasets downloaded from the gene expression omnibus (GEO) with a leave one dataset out validation process. The different lncRNA expression profiles between NSCLC and normal tissue and between the subtypes of NSCLC may have potential implications in the pathogenesis of this cancer. lncRNAs screening may be beneficial in the diagnosis, subclassification, and the personalized treatment of NSCLC.