微小RNA与肿瘤耐药

MicroRNA and anticancer drug resistance

微小RNA（miRNA）是近年来在真核生物中发现的、在转录后水平负调控基因表达的一类长约22个核苷酸的非编码小分子RNA。miRNA生物学效应广泛，与细胞生长、凋亡、新陈代谢和信号转导等密切相关。已报道miRNA在各种肿瘤中表达失常，可能发挥着癌基因和抑癌基因的双重作用，同时越来越多的研究表明miRNA在调节肿瘤细胞对抗肿瘤药物耐药方面发挥着重要作用。系统深入地研究miRNA在肿瘤耐药中的机制，将为发展基于miRNA逆转肿瘤耐药的治疗策略提供重要的依据。

MicroRNAs （miRNAs） are a small noncoding family of 22 nt RNAs that play an important role in the negative regulation of gene expression at the post-transcriptional level by base pairing to the 3＇ untranslated region of target messenger RNAs. miRNAs are involved in a variety of basic processes, such as cell proliferation and apoptosis, metabolism and signaling pathways.A lot of studies have indeed described the aberrant expression of miRNAs in human tumors and have investigated their potential role as oncogenes or tumor suppressor genes, depending on the targets they regulate.Furthermore,more and more studies have demonstrated that an important role of miRNAs in anticancer drug resistance and miRNA expression profiling can correlate with the development of anticancer drug resistance. A systematic and intensive study on the mechanisms of miRNA in anticancer drug resistance will provide us a strong rationale for the development of miRNA-based therapeutic strategies aiming to overcome cancer cell resistance. This paper has reviewed the recent development of miRNAs involved in anticancer drug resistance.