Circular RNA circMYO9B facilitates breast cancer cell proliferation and invasiveness via upregulating FOXP4 expression by sponging miR-4316.

Recently, circular RNAs (circRNAs) have been demonstrated as essential regulators in human cancers. However, the function and mechanism of circRNAs in breast cancer (BC) remain largely unknown and require to be investigated. In the present study, we found that circMYO9B was highly expressed in BC tissues by bioinformatics analysis. And we showed that circMYO9B expression was positively correlated with patients' prognosis. Moreover, we found that circMYO9B knockdown significantly suppressed the proliferation, migration and invasion of BC cells in vitro. In vivo assays also indicated that circMYO9B silence delayed tumor growth. In mechanism, we found that circMYO9B promoted the expression of FOXP4 by sponging miR-4316 in BC cells. We showed that the expression of miR-4316 was inversely associated with that of circMYO9B or FOXP4 in BC tissues. Finally, we found that restoration of FOXP4 expression significantly reversed the effects of circMYO9B knockdown on BC cell proliferation, migration and invasion. In conclusion, our findings demonstrated a key role of circMYO9B/miR-4316/FOXP4 axis in regulating BC progression.