MALAT1 and neurodegenerative disease: MALAT1 was originally reported to be associated with cancerogenesis (Yoshimoto et al., 2016; Amodio et al., 2018; Li et al., 2018b); however, MALAT1 also plays an important role in neuronal systems (Zhang et al., 2017), where it has apoptotic and stress response functions, and in neurodegenerative diseases (Wu et al., 2013).