Review The molecular mechanism of HOTAIR in tumorigenesis, metastasis, and drug resistance

Long non-coding RNAs have been reported to play an im-portant role in cellular metabolism and development. Homeobox transcript antisense intergenic RNA (HOTAIR), a long non-coding RNA, is pervasively over-expressed in most human cancers compared with non-cancerous adjacent tissues. Although many articles have reported that HOTAIR is closely associated with metastasis, epithelial-mesenchymal transition, advanced pathological stage, drug resistance, and poor prognosis, the role of HOTAIR in gene regulation and tumor development is largely unknown, and the potential mo-lecular mechanisms are not complete clear yet. In this review, we summarized the recent progress in the study of the major functions of HOTAIR. miR-331-3p, miR-130a, miR-7, miR-141, HER2, c-MYC, WIF-1, RBM38, PTEN, and Col-1 are involved in the HOTAIR regulation network. We tried to elu-cidate the molecular mechanisms of HOTAIR in the aspects of tumorigenesis, metastasis, drug resistance, and regulation