Linking lncRNAs to regulation, pathogenesis, and diagnosis of pulmonary hypertension

Abstract

Pulmonary hypertension (PH) is a syndrome characterized by a persistent increase in pulmonary vascular resistance. Due to the lack of specificity in clinical manifestations, patients are usually diagnosed at the late stage of PH, which is hard to treat and often causes right heart failure and death. Furthermore, the regulation and pathogenesis of PH remain obscure. Recently, long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs), a type of transcript longer than 200 nt that lacks protein-coding ability, have been found to substantially influence the incidence and progression of various diseases through regulating gene expression at the chromatin, transcriptional, post-transcriptional, translational, and even post-translational levels. The crucial roles of lncRNAs in PH have started to draw widespread attention. This review summarizes the regulatory, pathogenic, and diagnostic roles of lncRNAs in PH, in the hope to facilitate the search for early diagnostic markers of and effective therapeutic targets for this devastating disease.

Keywords:

• Pulmonary hypertension
• long noncoding RNA
• vascular remodeling
• pulmonary arterial smooth muscle cells
• pulmonary artery endothelial cells

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Key Project of Tianjin Municipal Science and Technology Commission (17JCZDJC35600); The 2017 Training Program for Young and Middle-aged Backbone Talents in Colleges and Universities in Tianjin; High-level Innovative Talent Program for Distinguished Scholar (YDYYRCXM-B2018-02); The project from National Natural Science Foundation of China (81970827).