MicroRNA in human cancer and chronic inflammatory diseases

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are the non-coding RNAs that act as post-translational regulators to their complimentary messenger RNAs (mRNA). Due to their specific gene silencing property, miRNAs have been implicated in a number of cellular and developmental processes. Also, it has been proposed that a particular set of miRNA spectrum is expressed only in a particular type of tissue. Many interesting findings related to the differential expression of miRNAs in various human diseases including several types of cancers, neurodegenerative diseases and metabolic diseases have been reported. Deregulation of miRNA expression in different types of human diseases and the roles various miRNAs play as tumour suppressors as well as oncogenes, suggest their contribution to cancer and/or in other disease development. These findings have possible implications in the development of diagnostics and/or therapeutics in human malignancies. In this review, we discuss various miRNAs that are differentially expressed in human chronic inflammatory diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, cancer and the further prospective development of miRNA based diagnostics and therapeutics.