Head and neck cancer (HNC) is among the common cancer in Malaysia. Depending on the location of the cancer in head and neck region, each type of HNC has its own characteristics and prevalence to specific gender and ethnicity. The remote and inaccessible location of the cancer also cause the difficulty to detect the cancer. This make the cancer usually diagnosed at late stage and make the treatment very challenges and ended with low survival rate of post-treatment among HNC patients. In fact, the detection of HNC at early stage could promise high successful recovery rate. This situation demand lots of studies to explore the carcinogenesis of HNC and searching for robust diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic biomarkers. MicroRNA (miRNA) is a class of non-coding RNA that regulate cellular physiology at post-transcriptional level. miRNAs expression has
been found to deregulate in various disease state, including cancer. A few studies revealed that miRNAs can behave as oncogenic and tumour suppressor in HNC. Even HNC is common in Malaysia, the studies of miRNA in HNC are still scarce. In this review article, we highlight the studies of miRNA in HNC that have been published by Malaysian researchers with aim to call more Malaysian researchers to focus on miRNA researches in HNC.
The aim of this study was to investigate the level of miR-744 expression in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) tumour tissue and to provide initial clue on its potential as biomarkers for early detection of NPC in a preliminary analysis. Total miRNAs was extracted from NPC tissue as well as normal nasopharynx tissue taken from Hospital Tengku Ampuan Afzan (HTAA), Kuantan and converted into cDNA. The level of miR-744 expression in the cDNA was quantified using quantitative reverse transcription polymserase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) technique. The expression level of SNORD48 was measured simultaneously for each sample, which served as endogenous control. The difference in the expression of miR-744 in NPC and normal nasopharynx tissue were analysed using relative quantification, 2-ΔΔCT. In this preliminary analysis, this study found that miR-744 was upregulated in NPC as compared to normal nasopharynx tissue by 2.5 fold changes, respectively suggesting it may involve in progression of tumour. However, the finding is not significant and may not accurately reflect the overall population, due to small sample size involved in the study. Findings from the current study suggest the potential of miR-744 to serve as useful diagnostic and prognostic biomarker in NPC.