ViStA Lab, Department of Biological Sciences, BITS, Pilani - K K Birla Goa Campus, Zuarinagar, Goa 403726, India.
Curr Top Med Chem. 2018;18(30):2544-2554. doi: 10.2174/1568026619666181120121830.
Since their discovery in the 1990's, the study of a class of non-coding, single-stranded RNAs, christened the microRNAs has opened up new vistas in the field of cancer biology. MicroRNAs bind to their target mRNAs to act as either oncogenes or tumour suppressors. With the near-complete elucidation of the biogenesis pathway, and the advent of rapid sequencing technologies, microRNAs have slowly cemented their place as essential biomarkers for delineating the progression, metastasis, relapse or drug resistance of cancer. Being crucial players in the cancer pathway, there has been considerable urgency in designing molecules - both at the nucleotide and non-nucleotide level to counter the effects of their binding. A number of different approaches have yielded quite a body of compounds which have been found to be effective in the treatment of various tumours across many different organs. In this study, the focus is on the review of the timeline of discovery and characterization of microRNAs, underlining their importance in different cancers, shedding light on the discovery of anti-microRNA compounds and illustrating their uses in deriving new strategies to combat cancer.
自 20 世纪 90 年代发现以来，对一类非编码的单链 RNA（被命名为 microRNA）的研究为癌症生物学领域开辟了新的前景。microRNA 与它们的靶 mRNA 结合，起到癌基因或肿瘤抑制基因的作用。随着生物发生途径的近乎完全阐明，以及快速测序技术的出现，microRNA 已经慢慢确立了自己作为界定癌症进展、转移、复发或耐药性的重要生物标志物的地位。作为癌症途径中的关键参与者，人们迫切需要设计分子——无论是核苷酸还是非核苷酸水平，以对抗它们结合的影响。许多不同的方法已经产生了相当数量的化合物，这些化合物已被发现对许多不同器官的各种肿瘤的治疗有效。在这项研究中，重点是回顾 microRNA 的发现和表征的时间表，强调它们在不同癌症中的重要性，阐明抗 microRNA 化合物的发现，并说明它们在制定新的抗癌策略中的应用。
