First discovered in 2006 (Guimaraes-Sternberg et al., 2006), the miR-181 family, primarily miR-181a, has become implicated in regulation of differentiation states of a wide range of biological processes and pathologies: cancer progression and cancer cell apoptosis (Feng et al., 2018; Braicu et al., 2019), insulin metabolism and diabetes mellitus (Kang et al., 2020; Cheng et al., 2021), T-cell differentiation and spontaneous autoimmunity disorders (Li et al., 2007; Schaffert et al., 2015), myocardial infarction and heart muscle function (Chen et al., 2018; Qi et al., 2020), and others. The gene discussed is INS; the disease is cancer.