Introductory Editorial: Water Microbiology

Abstract

Cancer Informatics represents a hybrid discipline encompass -ing the fields of oncology, computer science, bioinformat -ics, statistics, computational biology, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, pharmacology, and quantitative epidemiology. The common bond or challenge that unifies the various dis -ciplines is the need to bring order to the massive amounts of data generated by researchers and clinicians attempting to find the underlying causes and effective means of treating cancer. The future cancer informatician will need to be well-versed in each of these fields and have the appropriate background to leverage the computational, clinical, and basic science resources necessary to understand their data and separate signal from noise. Knowledge of and the communication among these specialty disciplines, acting in unison, will be the key to success as we strive to find answers underlying the complex and often puzzling diseases known as cancer.