Lab Note Clinical significance of up-regulated miRNA-181a in prognosis and progression of esophageal cancer

Human esophageal cancer is one of the most lethal malig-nancies with a variable regional distribution, which is the sixth leading cause of cancer mortality worldwide [1]. It has two main types, esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) and adenocarcinoma, and ESCC is the dominant histological type in China [2]. Tumor metastasis is mostly re-sponsible for ESCC mortality, but the molecular mechanism of metastatic dissemination remains obscure [3]. Therefore, identification of new prognostic biomarkers is urgently needed to understand the molecular mechanisms of metasta-sis involved in ESCC, and to predict novel targeted thera-peutic strategies for this disease. miRNAs are small non-coding RNAs that act as negative regulators of target gene expression by binding to the 30-untranslated region (30-UTR) of target mRNA, resultin