Role of circular RNAs in cardiovascular diseases

Abstract

Over the last several decades, cardiovascular diseases largely increase the morbidity and mortality especially in developed countries, affecting millions of people worldwide. Although extensive work over the last two decades attempted to decipher the molecular network of regulating the pathogenesis and progression of these diseases, evidences from clinical trials with newly revealed targets failed to show more evidently salutary effects, indicating the inefficiency of understanding the complete regulatory landscape. Recent studies have shifted their focus from coding genes to the non-coding ones, which consist of microRNAs (miRNAs), long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) and the lately re-discovered a unique group of RNAs—circular RNAs (circRNAs). As the focus now has been shifted to the newly identified group of non-coding RNAs, circRNAs exhibit stability, highly conservation and relative enriched expression abundance in some cases, which are distinct from their cognate linear counterparts—lncRNAs. So far, emerging evidence begins to support the critical role of circRNAs in organogenesis and pathogenesis as exemplified in the central nervous system, and could be just as implicative in the cardiovascular system, suggesting a therapeutic perspective in related diseases.

Impact statement

Circular RNAs are important regulators of multiple biological processes such as organogenesis and oncogenesis. Although the bulk of concerning studies focused on revealing their diversified roles in various types of cancers, reports began to accumulate in cardiovascular field these days. We summarize circular RNAs implicated in cardiovascular diseases, aiming to highlight the advances in the knowledge of such diseases and their potential of being promising target for diagnosis and therapy.