Circular RNAs: An emerging type of non-coding RNA and their potential implications in bladder cancer

According to the US National Cancer Institute (NCI; http://www.cancer.gov/ accession October, 2017), bladder cancer (BC) is the 6th most common type of cancer in the Western countries, with ~350,000 new cases/year and a constantly increasing incidence (1). Patients with BC have been commonly stratified according to molecular alterations (i.e., somatic mutations and gene fusions) in FGFR3 and TP53 genes. However, large-scale studies from international consortia (especially from The Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network, Nature 2014) have depicted a more complex picture, reporting the deregulation of a large network of genes (2). Non-coding RNAs, both long and small-RNAs (lncRNAs and miRNAs, respectively)--have been postulated to contribute, at least partially, to the wide deregulation observed in BC.