Welcome to RCDB

Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is the sixth leading cause of cancer deaths in Western countires with steadily escalating incidence over the last two decades. RCC is a pheneotypically and genetically heterogenous disease which is classified based on morphological and genetic differences. This classification distinguishes metanephric adenoma oncocytoma and papillary adenoma as benign tumours from the clear cell (ccRCC), papillary/chromophilic, chromophobic (chRCC) and collecting duct RCC. This is important because of its prognostic implications. ccRCC is the most common and accounts for 70% of RCCs.
The literature abounds with the information about genes implicated in RCC which has been gained through a variety of high-throughput 'omics' techniques including microarray profiling, proteomics analysis, Deep Gene Sequencing, Exome sequencing etc. However the information is rather sporadic. Renal Cancer gene Database (RCDB) is a repository of the protein-coding and non-coding genes (miRNAs) contributing to the etiology and pathogenesis of different types of renal cancer. The coding genes have been classified into six broad categories according to the dysregulation observed in RCC. These include 1) silencing through Methylation, 2) Overexpression, 3) Downregulation, 4) Mutation and 5) Translocation and 6) Unclassified.
Many of the miRNAs act as oncogenes or tumor suppressor genes, and are referred to as "oncomirs". High-throughput methods have been used to investigate the miRNA expression pattern and the existing data have confirmed the aberrant expression of many miRNAs in various RCC types. Thus, miRNAs could be a novel kind of candidate biomarkers for the identification and classification of human RCCs. RCDB catalogs the human miRNAs differentially expressed in RCC. These have been categorised according to their differential expression in the different types of RCC.

I anticipate this database to serve as a unified information portal for researchers working on kidney cancers.