Cancer and neurodegenerative disorders: Pathogenic convergence through microRNA regulation

Abstract

Despite the fact that cancer and neurodegenerative disorders are two separate diseases with unique pathology, it can be construed from emerging pieces of evidence that these two types of diseases share common mechanisms of genetic and molecular abnormalities. Recent studies and current understanding show that individual microRNAs (miRNAs) may be involved in the pathology of these two apparently diverse diseases, indicating that there is a common mechanism that leads to the theory of dysregulation in gene expression at the post-transcriptional level. Several miRNA-based therapeutic approaches have shown efficacy in the modulation of activities of miRNAs, indicating their potential to treat a number of pathological conditions.  On the same lines, the role of miRNAs in the converging pathways of leading both diseases suggests good prospects for developing common therapeutic strategies for both diseases. Not only for therapeutic approaches, but the miRNAs also dysregulated in both diseases might be promisingly viewed as uniquely informative diagnostic markers. In this paper, we review recent studies on the miRNAs involved in both cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.