Expert review reveals the expansion of regulatory non-coding RNAs in human genomics, highlighting therapeutic opportunities for long non-coding and circular RNAs.
Long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) and circular RNA (circRNA) biology has changed beyond recognition over the past 20 years. LncRNAs, once dismissed as transcriptional noise, are now accepted as regulators of chromatin, transcription, RNA processing and translation 1 . CircRNAs have moved from a curiosity to a class of molecules with their own back-splicing biology and an early position in clinical development 2 . The number of annotated lncRNA genes in the human genome already exceeds the number of protein-coding genes 3 , and lncRNA- and circRNA-based therapeutics are now in clinical pipelines. Experimental & Molecular Medicine (EMM) has tracked this growth closely, and our 2024 Special Feature on regulatory RNA reflected the directions we then considered most promising 4 .
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Kim et al. (2026) studied this question.
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