. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2017 Oct 31.

Published in final edited form as: Recent Results Cancer Res. 2016;209:51–60. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-42934-2_4

Table 1.

Characteristics of noncoding RNAs for cancer gene therapy

	microRNA	siRNA	shRNA
Length	Primary (various), precursor (~70 nt), mature (18–25 nt)	~21 nt	25–27 nt
RNA structure	Primary (contains a hairpin), precursor (hairpin), mature (double-stranded)	Double-stranded	Hairpin
Targeting specificity	Intrinsically determined by seed sequence	Artificially designed	Artificially designed
Production	Chemical synthesis, viral expression, transgene expression	Chemical synthesis	Viral expression
Delivery method	Viral, non-viral and transgene	Non-viral vectors	Viral vectors