MicroRNAs in cancer

By Yong Sun Lee, Anindya Dutta. Annual Review of Pathology, 2009

926 citations recorded by the source corpus.

During the last few years, studies on microRNA (miRNA) and cancer have burst onto the scene. Profiling of the miRNome (global miRNA expression levels) has become prevalent and abundant miRNome data are currently available from various cancers. The pattern of miRNA expression can be correlated with cancer type, stage, and other clinical variables, so that miRNA profiling can be used as a tool for cancer diagnosis and prognosis. miRNA expression analyses also suggested oncogenic (or tumor suppressive) roles of miRNAs. miRNAs play roles in almost all aspects of cancer biology such as proliferation, apoptosis, invasion/metastasis, and angiogenesis. Given that many miRNAs are deregulated in cancers but have not yet been further studied, it is expected that more miRNAs will emerge as players in the etiology and progression of cancer. miRNAs will be also discussed as a tool for cancer therapy. SYNOPSIS During the last decade, a major discovery in biology was the discovery of small RNAs, including miRNA (microRNA) and siRNA (small interfering RNA), as highlighted by the 2002 December issue of Science magazine (1). Since RNA interference (RNAi) phenomenon was discovered in nematodes (2), siRNA has provided a technical breakthrough for short term genetics in mammalian systems. The big impact of small RNAs was well celebrated by the 2006 Nobel prize awarded to the two scientists who discovered RNAi. On the other side, miRNAs shed new insight on the post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. miRNAs were also first discovered in worms (3, 4), and later in a number of animals, plants, and viruses. During the last couple of years, the miRNA field has been expanding with many recent publications implicating miRNAs in diverse cellular processes. Cancer is a major cause of death in the United States (“Cancer Facts & Figures 2007” from American Cancer Society; http://www.cancer.org/docroot/stt/stt_0.asp). Cancer is a complex genetic disease caused by the accumulation of mutations that lead to deregulation of gene expression and uncontrolled cell proliferation. Given the wide impact of miRNAs on gene expression, it is not surprising that a number of miRNAs have been implicated in cancer. In this review, the links between miRNA and cancer will be comprehensively described and discussed.

Subfields: Cancer Research, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ca7bc075df2f294ec5f531483ea2c615dd667335

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

  1. Liang Ma
  2. P. Fu
  3. Rong-shuang Huang

Citations in the corpus