Editorial: Therapeutic Potential of microRNAs in Vascular Disease

Cardiovascular disease has become the predominant cause of human morbidity and mortality in the industrialized world, devouring extraordinary efforts to determine the molecular and pathophysiological characteristics of the diseased heart and vasculature, while aiming to develop novel diagnostic and therapeutic strategies to treat the associated diseases. The collective work of multiple research groups has uncovered a complex transcriptional and posttranscriptional regulatory circuit, which is believed to be essential for maintaining vascular homeostasis. Recently, a novel class of small noncoding RNAs, called microRNAs, was identified as powerful posttranscriptional regulators, orchestrating the translational output of target messenger RNAs (mRNAs) by promoting mRNA degradation and/or inhibiting translation. With the discovery of microRNAs being powerful modulators in a wide variety of diseases, it is only a logical consequence that the possibilities of viewing microRNAs as promising therapeutic entities are being heavily investigated.