LINC00968 is differentially expressed in brain metastatic breast cancer.
Breast cancer patients diagnosed with metastasis to the brain (1-3) are presented limited treatment options (4, 5). We mined published microarray data (6, 7) to discover genes associated with brain metastasis in human breast cancer at the transcriptome-level and in an unbiased fashion. We describe here the differential expression of the long intergenic non-coding RNA LINC00968 in the brain metastatic tissues and primary tumors of women with breast cancer. LINC00968 transcript was present at significantly reduced quantities at in brain metastases and in primary tumors of the breast as compared to untransformed breast tissues. Molecular functions and down-regulation of LINC00968, a non-coding RNA that has not previously been described in relation to central nervous system metastasis in human breast cancer represents a feature of the transcriptional fingerprint of brain metastatic breast cancer in humans and may be relevant to pathways underlying invasion and colonization of the brain.