The role of circular RNA during the urological cancer metastasis: exploring regulatory mechanisms and potential therapeutic targets

Metastasis is a major contributor to treatment failure and death in urological cancers, representing an important biomedical challenge at present. Metastases form as a result of cancer cells leaving the primary site, entering the vasculature and lymphatic vessels, and colonizing clones elsewhere in the body. However, the specific regulatory mechanisms of action underlying the metastatic process of urological cancers remain incompletely elucidated. With the deepening of research, circular RNAs (circRNAs) have been found to not only play a significant role in tumor progression and prognosis but also show aberrant expression in various tumor metastases, consequently impacting tumor metastasis through multiple pathways. Therefore, circRNAs are emerging as potential tumor markers and treatment targets. This review summarizes the research progress on elucidating how circRNAs regulate the urological cancer invasion-metastasis cascade response and related processes, as well as their role in immune microenvironment remodeling and circRNA vaccines. This body of work highlights circRNA regulation as an emerging therapeutic target for urological cancers, which should motivate further specific research in this regard.