Potential Uses of MicroRNA in Lung Cancer Diagnosis, Prognosis, and Therapy
Lung cancer is the leading cause of death from cancer in the world. Although the molecular network of lung carcinogenesis has been partly known at the levels of genes and proteins, and personalized therapy based on the genetic changes has made considerable progress in the last decade, the high mortality rate is not markedly changed. MicroRNAs (miRNAs), a class of short endogenous RNAs, acting as post-transcriptional regulators of gene expression, are similar with siRNAs in both the biosynthesis and the function steps. While, miRNAs mostly silence gene expression by binding imperfectly matched sequences in the 3' UTR of target mRNA, which is different with siRNAs by targeting ORF of mRNA with a perfectly complementary manner. miRNAs have multiple functions in lung development, and abnormal expression of miRNAs could lead to lung tumorigenesis. The different expression profiles of miRNAs in lung cancer, and the stability of miRNAs in serum, all together make them as new potentially clinical biomarkers for diagnosis and prognosis. Moreover, miRNAs may serve as either novel potential targets acting directly as oncogenes (e.g. miR-17-92 cluster) or directly therapeutic molecules working as tumor suppressor genes (e.g. let-7 family). RNAi technology based on miRNAs has many advantages over siRNAs, such as in vivo stability, highly RNA promoter-compatibility and no overt toxicity. Eventually, it might overcome the present disadvantages and become a good candidate for lung cancer therapy.
Keywords: Lung cancer; RNAi; let-7; miR-17-92 cluster; microRNA; oncogene; tumor suppressor gene
Document Type: Research Article
Publication date: 01 June 2009
- Current Cancer Drug Targets aims to cover all the latest and outstanding developments on the medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, molecular biology, genomics and biochemistry of contemporary molecular drug targets involved in cancer, e.g. disease specific proteins, receptors, enzymes, genes.
Each issue of the journal contains a series of timely in-depth reviews written by leaders in the field covering a range of current topics on drug targets involved in cancer.
As the discovery, identification, characterization and validation of novel human drug targets for anti-cancer drug discovery continues to grow; this journal has become essential reading for all pharmaceutical scientists involved in drug discovery and development. - Editorial Board
- Information for Authors
- Subscribe to this Title
- Ingenta Connect is not responsible for the content or availability of external websites
- Access Key
- Free content
- Partial Free content
- New content
- Open access content
- Partial Open access content
- Subscribed content
- Partial Subscribed content
- Free trial content