Involvement of lncRNA-mediated signaling pathway in the development of cervical cancer.

Cervical cancer (CC) develops, after human papillomavirus (HPV), an infection transmitted through sexual contact. Worldwide estimates are around >500,000 CC diagnoses and >300,000 related deaths annually, and CC remains the second most devastating type of cancers in women after breast cancer. Although the vaccine against HPV has reduced the incidence of infection and the treatment efficacy of the early-stage diagnoses has improved, many challenges remain in terms of treatment efficacy, during the late-stage and prevention of chemotherapy resistance development. Thus, new tools for prompt diagnoses and more effective curative treatments (including the development of targeted gene therapies) are needed. The long non-coding RNAs (LncRNAs) (>200 nucleotides) are transcripts that do not encode for any proteins, and they have been linked to the development of cancers (such as leukemia and breast, colorectal, and liver cancers). Some lncRNAs have been identified as the cause of the dysregulation of the oncogenes and progression of CC, but these studies are still very preliminary. In this review, we explore the literature for lncRNAs involved in the development of CC and their signaling pathways to identify those that might serve as early diagnostic biomarkers, or as targets for gene therapy or other curative treatments.