The concept of a hype cycle is a well-established business concept, in which novel ideas are said to have an initial wave of hype followed by disillusionment. Only after that, the novel concept takes off and become truly useful entering a so-called plateau of productivity. In biomedical science, the field of microRNAs (miRNAs) certainly had a peak of interest in the end of the last decade. This led by high impact publications (1) and characterization of both novel miRNA-entities as well as their associations to a broad range of diseases. Nonetheless, no clear pharmaceutical successes emerged: miRNA targets are being pursued as therapeutic targets, but none have as of yet successfully made it through clinical trials (2). Likewise the use of miRNA-based treatment strategies targeting regular mRNA is an area of interest (3). In this editorial we focus on a third aspect of miRNAs: the use of miRNAs as prognostic biomarkers in disease, asking the question if miRNAs are now entering this plateau of productivity in which actual benefit will be seen.
We focus on the recent paper by Bye et al.: “Circulating microRNAs predict future fatal myocardial infarction in healthy individuals – The HUNT study” (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27192016).
The hunt for fatal myocardial infarction biomarkers: predictive circulating microRNAs.
Russo F, Rizzo M, Belling K, Brunak S, Folkersen L.
Ann Transl Med. 2016 Oct;4(Suppl 1):S1.
Extracellular Oncogenes as Biological Effectors and Biomarkers
Ubiquitous release of exosomal tumor suppressor miR-6126 from ovarian cancer cells
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