Year: 2016
Type: article
Abstract: Oncology has, arguably, led the development of precision medicine in recent decades, with genomic and molecular advances informing the development of targeted therapies that have revolutionized treatment of certain individual cancer types.The cancer genomics arena is particularly exciting at the present time for two reasons: many groups across the world have been working hard in recent years to characterize tumor genomes and to report their findings from a tissue site-specific and a pan-cancer perspective.This huge body of genomic information generated by The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), The International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC), and The Pediatric Cancer Genome Project has contributed significantly to our understanding of individual cancer types.There has, importantly, also been a huge expansion of technical advances, including devices to support next-generation sequencing, high-sensitivity digital droplet PCR, methods for analysis of cell-free DNA, new error correction approaches for ultra-deep sequencing, and novel computational analysis tools.Together, these efforts have provided a golden opportunity for researchers to further mine the available data and begin to develop diagnostic and clinical applications to benefit patients.There have been questions regarding whether large-scale cancer discovery genomics projects were the best use of limited research funds-in terms of the opportunity cost of funding large-scale rather than multiple investigator-initiated research projects.Because we would argue strongly for the value of these large-scale projects, it is particularly gratifying that many papers in this special issue of PLOS Medicine strongly testify to the realization of the anticipated downstream impacts of these coordinated sequencing efforts by using large-scale data sets as a starting point for data mining, hypothesis generation, or as comparator data.Their value is further reflected in the intellectual communities that were created as a result of publicly and privately funded large-scale research and the new lines of research inquiry that originated from their novel findings.Finally, the improved technical standards throughout the cancer genomics field, both in terms of sequencing data quality and bioinformatics, ensure that the community will continue to benefit substantially in scientific advances from these landmark projects.As part of this special issue, research articles and perspectives on cancer genomics are appearing in PLOS Medicine throughout December 2016.These papers focus on a wide range of different cancers and experimental approaches and yield findings relevant both to future scientific research and potential clinical advances-here, we will highlight just a few of these excellent studies.Two research papers report on the profiling of the mutational landscape of widely metastatic breast cancer, from Charles Perou and colleagues at UNC Chapel Hill, a11111
Source: PLoS Medicine
Authors: Elaine R. Mardis, Marc Ladanyi
Language: English
Subfield: Cancer Research
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $6,460
OpenAlex ID: W2564550809