Omics approaches in cancer research

Abstract

Cancer is a complex genetic, proteomic, and cellular disease caused by multiple factors via genetic mutations (hereditary or somatic) or environmental factors. The emerging omics technologies are being increasingly used for cancer research and personalized drug discovery, including genomics, epigenomics, proteomics, cytomics, metabolomics, interactomics, and bioinformatics. Recent advances in high-throughput omics technologies have provided new opportunity in the molecular analysis of human cancer in an unprecedented speed and details. The detection and treatment of cancer is greatly facilitated by the omics technologies. For example, genomics analysis provides clue for gene regulation and gene knockdown for cancer management. The approval of Mammaprint and Oncotype DX indicates that multiplex diagnostic marker sets are becoming feasible. Discovery of the involvement of microRNAs in human cancers has opened a new page for cancer researchers. Some therapeutic drugs targeting on DNA methylation and histone deacetylation are currently undergoing keen studies. Proteomics also plays an important role in cancer biomarker discovery and quantitative proteome-disease relationships provide a mean for connectivity analysis. Fluorescent dye enables a more reliable analysis and it facilitates the progress of biochip and cytomics. The huge amount of information collected by multiparameter single cell flow-or slide-based cytometry measurements serves to investigate the molecular behavior of cancer cell populations. Cancer is also an ideal field of application for metabolite profiling owing to its unique biochemical properties. It is envisioned that omics technologies will enhance our understanding of molecular signatures of cancer on both qualitative and quantitative patterns. The novel omics technologies have brought powerful abilities to screen cancer cells at the gene, transcript, protein, metabolite, and their interaction network level in searching of novel drug targets, expounding the drug mechanism-of-action, identifying adverse effects in unexpected interaction, validating current drug targets, speeding up the discovery of new targets, exploring potential applications for novel drugs, and enabling the translation from bench to bedside. The field is moving fast, specialized techniques are being developed to integrate omics information and to enable new research avenues that can take advantage of and apply this information to new therapies. In this chapter, different omics technologies are briefly introduced. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.