Cancer Hallmarks and MicroRNAs: The Therapeutic Connection.

Human cancers are characterized by a number of hallmarks, including sustained proliferative signaling, evasion of growth suppressors, activated invasion and metastasis, replicative immortality, angiogenesis, resistance to cell death, and evasion of immune destruction. As microRNAs (miRNAs) are deregulated in virtually all human cancers, they show involvement in each of the cancer hallmarks as well. In this chapter, we describe the involvement of miRNAs in cancer from a cancer hallmarks and targeted therapeutics point of view. As no miRNA-based cancer therapeutics are available to date, and the only clinical trial on miRNA-based cancer therapeutics (MRX34) was terminated prematurely due to serious adverse events, we are focusing on protein-coding miRNA targets for which targeted therapeutics in oncology are already approved by the FDA. For each of the cancer hallmarks, we selected major protein-coding players and describe the miRNAs that target them.