NeuroOncology Laboratory, Mossakowski Medical Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, 02-106 Warsaw, Poland.
Tumor Microenvironment Laboratory, Mossakowski Medical Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences, 02-106 Warsaw, Poland.
Cells. 2023 Feb 8;12(4):552. doi: 10.3390/cells12040552.
The ever-increasing number of cancer cases and persistently high mortality underlines the urgent need to acquire new perspectives for developing innovative therapeutic approaches. As the research on protein-coding genes brought significant yet only incremental progress in the development of anticancer therapy, much attention is now devoted to understanding the role of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) in various types of cancer. Recent years have brought about the awareness that ncRNAs recognized previously as "dark matter" are, in fact, key players in shaping cancer development. Moreover, breakthrough discoveries concerning the role of a new group of ncRNAs, circular RNAs, have evidenced their high importance in many diseases, including malignancies. Therefore, in the following review, we focus on the role of circular RNAs in cancer, particularly in cancer stem-like cells, summarize their mechanisms of action, and provide an overview of the state-of-the-art toolkits to study them.
不断增加的癌症病例和持续居高不下的死亡率凸显出迫切需要为开发创新治疗方法获取新视角。由于对蛋白质编码基因的研究在癌症治疗的发展方面取得了重大但仅略有增量的进展，因此现在人们越来越关注理解非编码 RNA（ncRNA）在各种类型癌症中的作用。近年来，人们逐渐认识到，以前被认为是“暗物质”的 ncRNA 实际上是塑造癌症发展的关键因素。此外，关于一组新的 ncRNA——环状 RNA 的作用的突破性发现已经证明了它们在许多疾病（包括恶性肿瘤）中的重要性。因此，在下面的综述中，我们重点关注环状 RNA 在癌症中的作用，特别是在癌症类干细胞中的作用，总结它们的作用机制，并概述用于研究它们的最新工具包。
