Circ - Foxo3 is positively associated with the Foxo3 gene and leads to better prognosis of acute myeloid leukemia patients | BMC Cancer | Full Text

Circ - Foxo3 is positively associated with the Foxo3 gene and leads to better prognosis of acute myeloid leukemia patients | BMC Cancer | Full Text

BMC Cancer

Circ-Foxo3 is positively associated with the Foxo3 gene and leads to better prognosis of acute myeloid leukemia patients

• Jiao Zhou, 
• Ling-Yu Zhou, 
• Xi Tang, 
• Jing Zhang, 
• Ling-Ling Zhai, 
• Yun Yun Yi, 
• Jing Yi, 
• Jiang Lin, 
• Jun Qian & 
• Zhao-Qun Deng 

BMC Cancervolume 19, Article number: 930 (2019) | Download Citation

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Abstract

Background

The Foxo3 gene, belonging to the forkhead family, is one of the classes of transcription factors characterized by a forkhead DNA-binding domain, which usually considered being a cancer suppressor gene. Circ-Foxo3 is a circular structure which connects the 3’end to the 5’end. Scholars detected that circ-Foxo3 could compete with Foxo3 for binding to some miRNAs.

Methods

In this study, we will test the expression of Foxo3 and circ-Foxo3 in de novo acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients to explore the relationship between Foxo3 gene and circ-Foxo3. All the de novo AML samples and normal control samples was measured by real-time quantitative PCR. A receiver operating characteristic curve was conducted to differentiate AML patients from control people. Association of Foxo3 expression and overall survival was conducted by Kaplan-Meier survival analysis.

Results

We found that the expression of Foxo3 gene in de novo patients was significantly lower than control samples (P = 0.009). Meanwhile, circ-Foxo3 also expressed lower in de novo AML patients than in control samples (P = 0.040). In different classifications, this trend could be observed more remarkably. In non-M3 patients, the Foxo3 high patients’ survival time was longer than Foxo3 low patients (P = 0.002). Besides, in non-favorable risk groups, patients with low expression of Foxo3 had longer survival time than Foxo3 high patients (P = 0.004). Furthermore, in normal Karyotypic patients, the overall survival time of patients with high-expressed Foxo3 was significantly longer than those with low expression (P = 0.034). Besides, Pearson analysis was also conducted between these two genes in AML patients. Results revealed that they were positively correlated (R = 0.63, P < 0.001).

Conclusion

In conclusion, we found that low expression of circ-Foxo3 and Foxo3 were frequent in AML patients, and patients with high expression of Foxo3 often had a trend of better prognosis.