Clinical Application of MicroRNAs in Liver Diseases

Liver disease is a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Despite the great progress in the management of liver disease, the effective diagnostic and therapeutic approaches are lacking and there is an urgent need for noninvasive markers to improve diagnostics and prognostic ability in liver pathology and develop novel therapeutic agents for liver disorders. MicroRNAs are naturally occurring small noncoding RNAs that play important roles in lipid metabolism, apoptosis, proliferation, stem cell differentiation, and organ regeneration. They function primarily by binding to the 3(hermitian conjugative matrix)-untranslated regions (3(hermitian conjugative matrix)-UTR) of specific messenger RNAs (mRNAs), leading to mRNA cleavage or translational repression. More and more evidence has shown that miRNAs play important roles in the pathogenesis of many types of human diseases, including liver diseases.