Prospects of circular RNAs: the regulators of drug resistance and metastasis in gastric cancer.

Gastric cancer (GC) is one of the most common malignant tumors. Although there are multiple therapeutic methods, the 5-year survival rate for GC remains low primarily due to metastasis and resistance to chemotherapy. GC treatments, which include chemotherapy drugs, targeted drugs, and immunologic drugs, improve the prognosis of advanced GC patients. Nevertheless, resistance to these drugs may result in treatment failure. Tumor metastasis also plays a key role in tumor progression and limits the clinical efficacy of treatments. Recently, it has been reported that circular RNAs (circRNAs), non-coding RNAs, regulate GC drug resistance and metastasis to improve prognosis. In this review, we summarized systematically the underlying mechanisms of circRNA regulation of gastric neoplasm drug resistance and tumor metastasis. Thus we shed light on the potential of circRNAs to function as potential GC biomarkers and therapeutics. AJTR