BioCentury
ARTICLE | Targets & Mechanisms

Gazing deeper into cancer

January 8, 2009 8:00 AM UTC

Three recent genomic studies in glioblastoma multiforme,1 acute myeloid leukemia2 and lung adenocarcinoma3reveal potential new drug targets and provide a next step toward personalized, whole genome-based cancer diagnostics. Genomic sequencing could provide more robust data than existing cancer tests, which sample only a handful of the genes that could be mutated.

The next steps are to sequence multiple genomes, validate the markers and eventually build a unified theory of how mutational networks determine cancer risk, disease prognosis and response to treatment...