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Abstrato

The Role of Cancer Stem Cells and MicroRNAs in the Development and Progression of Pancreatic Cancer

Alia Ahmed, Shadan Ali, Philip A Philip and Fazlul H Sarkar

Pancreatic Cancer is one of the most malignant cancers in existence today. Due to its rapid ability to spread, it has resulted in poor prognosis. While the aggressive nature of the cancer is not fully understood, current research has suggested the role of microRNAs (miRNAs) and cancer stem cells (CSCs) in pancreatic cancer aggressiveness. The miRNAs are small RNA molecules that post-transcriptionally modify the expression of multiple genes by targeting different messenger RNAs (mRNAs), and miRNAs has been found to be associated with CSCs that are capable of undergoing self-renewal, cell growth and differentiation, leading to the development and maintenance of tumor aggressiveness. The connection between miRNAs and CSCs can be seen because the targets of certain miRNAs are associated with the expression of CSCs markers, and thus deregulation in the expression of both miRNAs and mRNAs in the CSCs are important for developing targeted therapies especially because such targeting may allow drug resistant cells such as CSCs to become resistive to conventional chemotherapeutics. This chapter will provide a comprehensive review on the role of some selected miRNAs in the context of CSCs and pancreatic cancer aggressiveness.