Potential Biomarkers for Therapeutic Monitoring and Clinical Outcome in Breast Cancer

Non-coding RNAs are a species of RNA that are not translated to proteins. These include transfer RNAs and ribosomal RNAs, microRNAs, transfer RNA-derived fragments, and long non-coding RNA. It is known that expression levels of some non-coding RNAs included microRNAs are altered in cancer cells or tumor tissues. Moreover, expression profiles of such non-coding RNAs correlate between tissues and body fluids. Therefore, several non-coding RNAs are being used as diagnostic/prognosis biomarkers or therapeutic targets in cancer. In this chapter, we review about representative non-coding RNAs and introduce especially microRNA as diagnosis/prognosis biomarkers and therapeutic targets.