Chemo-resistance and lung metastasis have been the two obstacles in the osteosarcoma (OS) treatment, which is still lack of effective biomarkers for prediction, diagnosis and treatment. Circular RNA (circRNA) is a new type of endogenous noncoding RNA that could serve as ideal biomarkers in cancer because of its stable loop structure. However, little is known about the diagnostic value of circRNAs in OS as well as their associations with clinicopathologic characteristics of OS patients. In the current study, we identified a novel circRNA, hsa_circ_0081001, screened by the RNA sequencing in the three paired chemo-resistant and chemo-sensitive OS cell lines (MG63/DXR vs MG63, KHOS/DXR vs KHOS, U2OS/DXR vs U2OS), and found that hsa_circ_0081001 was significantly up-regulated in the OS cell lines, tissues and serums, associated with poor overall survival and cox multivariate analysis showed that hsa_circ_0081001 was a novel independent prognostic factor for OS patients. Then, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis revealed that hsa_circ_0081001 could act as a biomarker for the OS diagnosis and prognosis prediction, better than alkaline phosphatase (ALP) and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH). In addition, we preliminarily found that hsa_circ_0081001 expression level may dynamically monitor and reflect the condition changes of OS patients in a small-scale prospective clinical pretest. In conclusion, our study suggested that circulating hsa_circ_0081001 could serve as a potential biomarker and therapeutic target for OS patients.
Keywords: biomarker.; circRNA; osteosarcoma.