MicroRNAs are naturally produced, using instructions encoded in DNA and are used in regulating protein production. Rosetta Genomics Ltd. (NasdaqGM: ROSG) is a leading developer of microRNA-based molecular diagnostics.

Until now, doctors have had difficulty determining which mesothelioma patients were the best candidates to receive the full array of anti-cancer treatments including surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. But new research may give doctors one more tool for identifying those patients, a New York personal injury lawyer said.

Researchers from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have developed and published an improved protocol for using quantitative reverse transcription PCR to analyze circulating microRNA biomarkers in blood plasma and serum.

Scientists at Cancer Research UK’s London Research Institute (LRI) and the Technical University of Denmark have developed an RNAi-based approach to determine paclitaxel response. Focusing on estrogen-receptor (ER)/progesterone-receptor (PR)/human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2; ERBB2)-negative (triple-negative) disease, they sequentially deleted 829 genes involved in cells’ response to the chemotherapy to see which missing or faulty genes would prevent the drug from working.

Primary tumours are not the big killers, it's the secondary tumours that account for 90 per cent of the mortality of cancer.

Now a new study out of the U.S. has shown that the microRNA, miR-9, plays a significant role in metastasis, both enabling cells to spread to other parts of the body as well as encouraging tumour angiogenesis.