LncRNA GAS5 plays a
tumor suppressive role in a variety of human
cancers and promises to be a novel diagnostic
biomarker,
therapy target, as well as prognostic
biomarker. However, the role of GAS5 in
nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) remains elusive. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the effect of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in GAS5 on treatment efficacy and toxicity in NPC patients receiving
chemoradiotherapy. Three potentially functional SNPs of GAS5 were genotyped in 267 NPC patients and validated in another 238 NPC patients treated with
chemoradiotherapy from southern China. Multivariate logistic regression analyses and stratification analyses were used to estimate the association of candidate SNPs and
chemoradiotherapy efficacy and toxic reactions. Our results showed that rs2067079 kept a consistent association with severe myelosuppression and severe
neutropenia in discovery set (OR=2.403, P=0.009; OR=2.454, P=0.015; respectively), validation set (OR=3.653, P=0.027; OR=4.767, P=0.016; respectively), and combined dataset (OR=1.880, P=0.007; OR=2.079, P=0.005; respectively). rs2067079 CT genotype carriers presented an even more remarkable increased risk of severe myelosuppression (OR=3.878, P=0.003) and severe
neutropenia (OR=3.794, P=0.009) in subgroups taking paclitaxel+platinum as
concurrent chemoradiotherapy regimen. Besides, we found a gene-does effect of rs6790, with the incidence rate of severe myelosuppression decreased from 23.56% to 17.21% to 10% and the incidence rate of severe
neutropenia decreased from 30.4% to 20.9% to 17.1% for rs6790 GG vs GA vs AA genotype carriers. Our results indicate the potential role of
lncRNA GAS5 polymorphisms rs2067079 and rs6790 as predictive
biomarkers for
chemoradiotherapy induced toxic reactions in NPC patients.