Abstract
Pancreatic Cancer is one of the most malignant cancers in existence today. Due to its rapid ability to spread, it has resulted in poor prognosis. While the aggressive nature of the cancer is not fully understood, current research has suggested the role of microRNAs (miRNAs) and cancer stem cells (CSCs) in pancreatic cancer aggressiveness. The miRNAs are small RNA molecules that post-transcriptionally modify the expression of multiple genes by targeting different messenger RNAs (mRNAs), and miRNAs has been found to be associated with CSCs that are capable of undergoing self-renewal, cell growth and differentiation, leading to the development and maintenance of tumor aggressiveness. The connection between miRNAs and CSCs can be seen because the targets of certain miRNAs are associated with the expression of CSCs markers, and thus deregulation in the expression of both miRNAs and mRNAs in the CSCs are important for developing targeted therapies especially because such targeting may allow drug resistant cells such as CSCs to become resistive to conventional chemotherapeutics. This chapter will provide a comprehensive review on the role of some selected miRNAs in the context of CSCs and pancreatic cancer aggressiveness.
Highlights
As cancer research progresses, there has recently been a dramatic increase in the amount of research being conducted with regards to microRNAs
Since the role of miRNAs is very crucial in the regulation of genes in human malignancies, deregulation of miRNAs could become novel strategies for the elimination of cancer stem cells (CSCs) or the reversal of epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) phenotype, which will be useful for achieving better treatment outcome in pancreatic cancer patients
Many patients have been shown to be resistant to conventional chemotherapeutic agents and recent evidence has illustrated that this could possibly be due to the proliferation of CSCs, down-regulation of tumor suppressing miRNAs, and up-regulation of oncogenic miRNAs
Summary
Alia Ahmed1, Shadan Ali2, Philip A Philip2 and Fazlul H Sarkar1,2* 1Department of Pathology and Oncology, Wayne State University School of Medicine, Detroit, Michigan, USA 2Karmanos Cancer Institute, Wayne State University School of Medicine, Detroit, Michigan, USA
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