The role of alternative splicing in gastric cancer

Gastric cancer (GC) remains a major cause of cancer incidence and mortality worldwide. Alternative splicing (AS), a post-transcriptional mechanism that expands transcript diversity from a single pre-mRNA, plays critical regulatory roles in GC. This review summarizes the current knowledge of AS in GC. Accumulating evidence shows that aberrant AS contributes to the oncogenesis, progression, invasion, metastasis and drug resistance of GC. In addition, AS-related biomarkers like RBM4 and prognostic models for subtype prediction have been reported. However, most existing studies have focused on basic research, while patient-level validation remains limited and standardized detection and analytical workflows are still lacking. Future work should prioritize prospective cohorts and standardized pipelines.