Chloroprocaine antagonizes progression of breast cancer by regulating LINC00494/miR‐3619‐5p/MED19 axis

Abstract Breast cancer, as the most prevalent female malignancy, leads the cancer‐related death in women worldwide. Local anesthetic chloroprocaine exhibits antitumor potential, but its specific functions and underlying molecular mechanisms in breast cancer remain unclear. Here, we demonstrated chloroprocaine significantly inhibited proliferation, invasion and induced apoptosis of breast cancer cells in vitro. Tumor growth and pulmonary metastasis were also suppressed in BABL/c nude mice model with chloroprocaine treatment. LINC00494 was identified as one of the most downregulated long noncoding RNAs in chloroprocaine‐treated breast cancer cells by high‐throughput sequencing. Futhermore, high level of LINC00494 was positively associated with poor outcome of breast cancer patients. LINC00494 acted as a “miRNAs sponge” to compete with MED19 for the biding of miR‐3619‐5p, led to the upregulation of MED19. LINC00494/miR‐3619‐5p/MED19 axis participated in chloroprocaine‐mediated inhibition of proliferation, invasion and promotion of apoptosis of breast cancer cells. Consequently, our finding suggested local anesthetic chloroprocaine attenuated breast cancer aggressiveness through LINC00494‐mediated signaling pathway, which detailly revealed the clinical value of chloroprocaine during breast cancer treatment.