Gastrointestinal Cancer Cells with Pt-resistance and Relationship with Aberrant Expression of Long Non-Coding RNAs

The anticancer drugs cis-diamminedichloridoplatinum (II) (cisplatin) and oxaliplatin are commonly used to treat patients with a number of cancers including gastrointestinal cancer. While platinum drugs have succeeded in prolonging overall progression-free survival of gastrointestinal cancer patients, treatment with platinum-based chemotherapeutics can cause resistance, and platinum-chemoresistance poses one of the main challenges to gastrointestinal cancer therapy and overall use of platinum-based chemotherapy. In addition to their interactions with DNA, Pt-chemotherapeutics commonly interact with cellular RNA. This manuscript explores the speciation of cisplatin and oxaliplatin, describes their interaction with DNA and RNA, and discusses similarities and differences which cause the different physiological responses of long non-coding RNAs upon treatment with platinum reagents. It explores the aberrant expression of long non-coding RNAs in gastrointestinal cancer including oral cavity cancer, esophageal cancer, gastric cancer, and colorectal cancer. Here we identify several long non-coding RNAs which are aberrantly expressed in platinum-resistant cell lines of gastrointestinal cancers. Although different gastrointestinal cancer cell lines are tested, increased or decreased aberrant expression compared to normal cells is found for the same long non-coding RNAs, suggesting that gene expression and cellular pathways are changed in a similar manner. Indubitably, further understanding of these phenomena will be beneficial to evaluate if these behaviors can be exploited to develop strategies for use in future therapeutic strategies for treatment of gastrointestinal cancer patients.