microRNA: The Impact on Cancer Stemness and Therapeutic Resistance

Cancer ranks as the second leading cause of death worldwide, causing a large social and economic burden. However, most anti-cancer treatments face the problems of tumor recurrence and metastasis. Therefore, finding an effective cure for cancer needs to be solved urgently. Recently, the discovery of...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inCells (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 9; no. 1; p. 8
Main Authors Jiao, Xueqiao, Qian, Xianling, Wu, Longyuan, Li, Bo, Wang, Yi, Kong, Xinyu, Xiong, Lixia
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Switzerland MDPI AG 18.12.2019
MDPI
Subjects
Apoptosis
Cancer
Cancer therapies
Cell growth
Chemotherapy
Gene expression
Kinases
Leukemia
Lung cancer
Metastases
Metastasis
MicroRNAs
miRNA
Post-transcription
Prognosis
Radiation therapy
Review
Stem cells
Tumors
cancer therapy
microRNA
cancer
cancer stem cell
therapeutic resistance
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Cancer ranks as the second leading cause of death worldwide, causing a large social and economic burden. However, most anti-cancer treatments face the problems of tumor recurrence and metastasis. Therefore, finding an effective cure for cancer needs to be solved urgently. Recently, the discovery of cancer stem cells (CSCs) provides a new orientation for cancer research and therapy. CSCs share main characteristics with stem cells and are able to generate an entire tumor. Besides, CSCs usually escape from current anti-cancer therapies, which is partly responsible for tumor recurrence and poor prognosis. microRNAs (miRNAs) belong to small noncoding RNA and regulate gene post-transcriptional expression. The dysregulation of miRNAs leads to plenty of diseases, including cancer. The aberrant miRNA expression in CSCs enhances stemness maintenance. In this review, we summarize the role of miRNAs on CSCs in the eight most common cancers, hoping to bridge the research of miRNAs and CSCs with clinical applications. We found that miRNAs can act as tumor promoter or suppressor. The dysregulation of miRNAs enhances cell stemness and contributes to tumor metastasis and therapeutic resistance via the formation of feedback loops and constitutive activation of carcinogenic signaling pathways. More importantly, some miRNAs may be potential targets for diagnosis, prognosis, and cancer treatments.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
ObjectType-Review-3
content type line 23
These authors contributed equally to this work.
ISSN:2073-4409
2073-4409
DOI:10.3390/cells9010008