Abstract
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide. HCC patients are commonly diagnosed at an advanced stage, for which highly effective therapies are limited. Moreover, the five-year survival rate of HCC patients remains poor due to high frequency of tumor metastasis and recurrence. These challenges give rise to the emergent need to discover promising biomarkers for HCC diagnosis and identify novel targets for HCC therapy. Circular RNAs (circRNAs), a class of long-overlook non-coding RNA, have been revealed as multi-functional RNAs in recent years. Growing evidence indicates that circRNA expression alterations have a broad impact in biological characteristics of HCC. Most of these circRNAs regulate HCC progression by acting as miRNA sponges, suggesting that circRNAs may function as promising diagnostic biomarkers and ideal therapeutic targets for HCC. In this review, we summarize the current progress in studying the functional role of circRNAs in HCC pathogenesis and present their potential values as diagnostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets. In-depth investigations on the function and mechanism of circRNAs in HCC will enrich our knowledge of HCC pathogenesis and contribute to the development of effective diagnostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets for HCC.
Highlights
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common malignancy of the liver, ranks the third leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide and has a significantly low survival rate [1,2].HCC causes at least 700,000 deaths every year around the world [3]
We summarize the current progress in studying the functional role of circRNAs in HCC pathogenesis and present their potential values as diagnostic biomarkers and therapeutic targets
We briefly summarize the characteristics and functions of circRNAs with emphasis on their functional role in biological processes associated with HCC tumorigenesis
Summary
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), the most common malignancy of the liver, ranks the third leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide and has a significantly low survival rate [1,2]. Increasing evidence indicates that these subtypes of short ncRNAs and lncRNAs play crucial regulatory roles in a variety of biological and cellular processes. Their best characterized function is regulation of gene expression. CircRNAs are highly conserved across multiple species and exhibit tissue-specific and development stage-dependent expression patterns [32,33] These features imply that circRNAs possess significant functions in biological and pathological processes. A better understanding of the function and mechanism of circRNAs in HCC tumorigenesis may contribute to the development of novel detection methods and effective therapeutic measures for HCC diagnosis and treatment
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