Divide and Conquer: Progress in the Molecular Stratification of Cancer
Patrick Tan
Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, Genome Institute of Singapore, Singapore; Cancer Science Institute of Singapore, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore.
Corresponding author: Dr. Patrick Tan, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, 8 College Road, Singapore 138672. Tel: 65-6-436-8345, Fax: 65-6-226-5694, Email: gmstanp@duke-nus.edu.sg
Received June 29, 2009.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
Cancer remains an outstanding cause of global morbidity and mortality, despite intensive research and unprecedented insights into the basic mechanisms of cancer development. A plethora of clinical and experimental evidence suggests that cancers from individual patients are likely to be molecularly heterogeneous in their use of distinct oncogenic pathways and biological programs. Efforts to significantly impact cancer patient outcomes will almost certainly require the development of robust strategies to subdivide such heterogeneous panels of cancers into biologically and clinically homogenous subgroups, for the purposes of personalizing treatment protocols and identifying optimal drug targets. In this review, I describe recent progress in the development of both targeted and genome-wide approaches for the molecular stratification of cancers, drawing examples from both the haematopoietic and solid tumor malignancies.
Keywords: Molecular stratification, cancer genomics, targeted therapies.
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