Emerging role of small ribonucleic acids in gastrointestinal tumors

Small regulatory ribonucleic acids (RNAs) are recently recognized as being connected with a growing list of common diseases such as: cancer, heart disease, diabetes and inflammation and to date more than 5,000 publications are recorded on PubMed alone. Specific pathways generate each class of RNAs and their activities converge in the process of silence interference.

In gastrointestinal malignancies microRNAs are deregulated, sometimes found in higher or lower levels depending on the type of malignancy and stage of the disease, functioning either as tumor suppressors or as oncogenes they interact forming regulatory loops with known transcription factors and signaling pathways. MiRNAs extracted from archived tissue biopsies can be used effectively as diagnostic, prognostic tools and molecular markers because they are stable over time and resistant to RNAse degradation. The distinct physiology of small RNAs may translate in more targeted cancer therapies in the near future.