Comment on “Diagnosis of long noncoding RNA LINC00173 in patients with melanoma is controversial”

Dear Editor,

We were very pleased to read the article entitled “Diagnostic and prognostic significance of long noncoding RNA LINC00173 in patients with melanoma” by Wang et al.¹ in which they revealed that LINC00173 expression could serve as an unfavorable prognostic biomarker for melanoma patients. However, some views should be raised in my opinion.

The main problem of the study was that the reliability of conclusions has been questioned in a study published recently. A study found that the LINC00173 was a potential target for the diagnosis, prognosis, and/or treatment of melanoma². However, this article was recently retracted because the authors were unable to provide satisfactory original data for their study³. As can be seen in patients and tissue samples section, 163 melanoma tissues and their pair-matched nontumor specimens in this study were obtained from patients who underwent radical resections at The First People’s Hospital of Jinan City from May 2012 to July 2015. Nevertheless, LINC00173 was first reported in 2017⁴. It is obviously unreasonable.

In conclusion, due to the above reason, diagnosis of long noncoding RNA LINC00173 in patients with melanoma is controversial.

REFERENCES

• ^1.
  Wang M, Liu W, Liu W, Wang C. Diagnostic and prognostic significance of long noncoding RNA LINC00173 in patients with melanoma. Rev Assoc Med Bras (1992). 2022;68(2):170-5. https://doi.org/10.1590/1806-9282.20210822
  » https://doi.org/10.1590/1806-9282.20210822
• ^2.
  Yang F, Lei P, Zeng W, Gao J, Wu N. Long noncoding RNA LINC00173 promotes the malignancy of melanoma by promoting the expression of IRS4 through competitive binding to microRNA-493. Cancer Manag Res. 2020;12:3131-44. https://doi.org/10.2147/CMAR.S243869
  » https://doi.org/10.2147/CMAR.S243869
• ^3.
  Long noncoding RNA LINC00173 promotes the malignancy of melanoma by promoting the expression of irs4 through competitive binding to microRNA-493 [Retraction]. Cancer Manag Res. 2021;13:7507-8. https://doi.org/10.2147/CMAR.S341519
  » https://doi.org/10.2147/CMAR.S341519
• ^4.
  Schwarzer A, Emmrich S, Schmidt F, Beck D, Ng M, Reimer C, et al. The non-coding RNA landscape of human hematopoiesis and leukemia. Nat Commun. 2017;8(1):218. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-00212-4
  » https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-00212-4

• Funding: none.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  24 June 2022
• Date of issue
  June 2022

History

• Received
  05 Mar 2022
• Accepted
  14 Mar 2022