European Journal of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences

CHARACTERIZING THE ROLE OF MIRNA IN CANCER WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO BREAST CANCER, LUNG CANCER AND COLORECTAL CANCER

Swarnab Sengupta, Ankita Sil, Debika Acharya, Ankita Dutta and Arindam Bhattacharjee*

ABSTRACT

In recent years, there has been a tremendous and growing interest among researchers to investigate the role of microRNA (miRNA) in normal cellular as well as in disease processes. miRNAs are short, noncoding RNAs with a length of ~22 nucleotides that negatively regulates target miRNAs. miRNAs cover an important role in all biological processes, including development, cell differentiation, proliferation and apoptosis. Aberrant miRNAs expression commonly associated with cancer. In this review, we discussed how miRNAs influence tumorigenesis by acting as oncogenes and tumour suppressors. Here we also discussed the role of miRNAs in cell cycle regulation. The control of cell proliferation by miRNAs is well established and the alteration of these small, non-coding RNAs may contribute to tumor development by perturbing critical cell cycle regulators. Oncogenic miRNAs may facilitate cell cycle entry and progression by targeting CDK inhibitors or transcriptional repressors of the retinoblastoma family. On the other hand, tumor suppressor miRNAs induce cell cycle arrest by downregulating multiple components of the cell cycle machinery. Recent researches also demonstrate that miRNAs also affect many apoptosis pathway. Indeed, it is becoming clear that many miRNAs are anti-apoptotic and mediate this effect by targeting pro-apoptotic mRNAs or positive regulators of pro-apoptotic mRNAs. Conversely many pro-apoptotic miRNAs target many anti-apoptotic miRNAs. In this review we also focused on three types of cancers like breast cancer, lung cancer, and colorectal cancer are the leading cause of cancer related death. Here we summarize the functions of small-RNA-based, posttranscriptional gene regulators, i.e. microRNAs, in the pathogenesis of cancers. We also discuss the miRNAs play oncogenic as well as tumour suppressor role. Here we also demonstrated the value of miRNAs as marker for diagnosis, prognosis and the promising field of miRNA-based novel therapies cancers.

Keywords: MiRNA, apoptosis, oncogenes, cancer.