Expression of Long Non-Coding RNA H19 in Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common cancer affecting children and adolescents (Zeng XL et al, 2023). ALL is a haematological malignancy characterized by the malignant clonal expansion of lymphoid hematopoietic precursors (Hong Z et al, 2021). It arises from B- or T-lineage lymphoid progenitors: B-cell-precursor ALL (B-ALL) and T-cell ALL (T-ALL) (Brady SW et al., 2022). Rrelapse in ALL is the fundamental cause of treatment failure in 15-20% of patients (Hulleman E et al, 2009). Therefore, the exploration of novel functional molecules that play a role in ALL pathogenesis could be effective therapeutic targets for this disease (Asadi M et al, 2023).

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are non-protein coding transcripts longer than 200 nucleotides (Kopp F et al, 2018). H19 was the first lncRNA to be discovered and submitted for genomic imprinting (Yoshimura H et al, 2018). It has a role in embryogenesis and tumorigenesis (Yoshimura H et al, 2014). It also has an indispensable role in enhancing cell proliferation, differentiation, migration, invasion, and chemo resistance (Li Y et al, 2020). Recent evidence has shown that H19 is an oncogene and is overexpressed in breast, liver, endometrial, lung, cervical, and esophageal cancers (Asadi M et al, 2023). A similar pattern of H19 expression was observed in various types of leukemias, including chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) (Morlando M et al, 2015) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML) (Zhang Tj et al, 2018).