Research progress on circular RNA in pancreatic cancer / 中华肝胆外科杂志

ABSTRACT

Circular RNA (circRNA) are a class of biologically conserved non-coding RNA. It has been found that various circRNA are differentially expressed in tumor tissues and are related with patients’ survival and prognosis. It’s shown that circRNA regulates microRNA (miRNA), interacts with proteins, regulates host gene expression, and translation of peptides. The early diagnosis rate of pancreatic cancer is low, and systemic chemotherapy has limited effect on the advanced patients with certain side effects. Basic researches showed that circRNAs affected the biological behavior of pancreatic cancer through a variety of signaling pathways, including MET/PI3K/Akt, ERK/VEGF, and Bcl-2/Caspase, suggesting that circRNAs are expected to be the biological markers and therapeutic targets for early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. This paper intends to summarize the characteristics, classification, function and mechanism of action of circRNA, as well as the research progress in pancreatic cancer, in order to provide basic theoretical support for the transformation of medical research into clinical application.