Table 9.

Major genes targeted by miR-203a-3p in various types of cancer

Cancers	Targeted gene products†	References
Cancers with down-regulation of miR-203a-3p
	Acting as oncogenes or tumor promoters
CRC	TYMS	Li et al. (2015a)
Glioblastoma	TYMS	Chen et al. (2017b)
NSCLC	AVL9, BIRC5, DLX5, E2F1, ZEB2	Liang et al. (2020); Yang et al. (2020); Wang et al. (2020a)
BLCA	SIX4	Na et al. (2019)
PDAC	SNAI2	An and Zheng (2020
	Acting both as oncogenes and tumor suppressors, or unclassified
CRC	THBS2	Qian et al. (2019)
GC	IGF1R	Wang et al. (2018a)
OVCA	ATM	Liu et al. (2019a)
Cancers with up-regulation of miR-203a-3p
	Acting as tumor suppressors
HCC	IL24, PTEN	Huo et al. (2017); Zhang et al. (2020)
	Acting both as oncogenes and tumor suppressors, or unclassified
CRC	PDE4D	Chen et al. (2018)

^†mRNAs encoding the following proteins: ATM codes for ATM Serine/Threonine Kinase (Ataxia Telangiectasia Mutated), although it is considered as a tumor suppressor, ATM signaling can be involved in chemoresistance of cancer cells (Cremona and Behrens 2014) as well as promote the EMT process (Liu et al. 2019a); AVL9 codes for cell migration associated protein and is an oncogene in NSCLC; BIRC5 can be regarded as an oncogene that codes for apoptosis inhibitor Survivin; DLX5 codes for transcriptional activator and acts as oncogene (Tan and Testa 2021); E2F1 encodes E2F Transcription Factor 1; IGF1R encodes the Insulin-like Growth Factor 1 Receptor (Werner et al. 2016); IL24 codes for interleukin 24, which can induce apoptosis in a variety of cancer cells, thereby acting as a tumor suppressor; PDE4D encodes cAMP-specific Phosphodiesterase 4D; PTEN is a tumor suppressor gene encoding Phosphatase and Tensin Homolog; SIX4 codes for transcriptional regulator and acts as oncogene; THBS2 codes for Thrombospondin 2; SNAI2 codes for SLUG which represses the gene encoding E-cadherin and thus promotes the EMT process of cancer cells