OMICs Profiling of Cancer Cells

Abstract

The number of people survive from cancer is increasing in the USA due to the advances in the early detection and treatment. Cancer is a complex disease caused by several factors such as genetics, epigenetics, proteomics, and transcriptional alterations or cellular damage that is resulted from several factors through genetic mutations and environmental effects. Early diagnosis has a pivotal role in the treatment or improving outcomes of cancer. Therefore, detecting cancer at early stages is a key challenge in cancer medicine and increases the survival rate. For early diagnosis, some genetics, proteomics, and metabolomics profiling should be considered using OMICs technologies. Traditional technologies using simplistic approach such as chemotherapy and surgery are relatively insufficient to facing challenges in the treatment of cancer. As a result, OMICs technologies mainly focus on the detection of entire genes which is applied into genomics, mRNA (transcriptomics), proteins (proteomics), metabolites (metabolomics), and lipids (lipidomics) in cells. The term genomics refers to the study of structure and function of DNA. Gene expression studies which is referred to transcriptomics are one of the oldest OMICs technologies, as it is the analysis of the entire RNA sequences in a cell. Proteomics technologies can identify the protein changes caused by disease process. Metabolomics is the study of small molecules, which are metabolites and are found in cells, tissues, and bio-fluids of an organism. Patterns of plasma lipid opulence are referred to as the lipidome. OMICs technologies, which system biology bring, are valuable tools for comprehensive analysis. The availability of DNA sequencing automatically enabled the sequencing of genomes; immunohistochemistry, which is one of the protein-based histopathological assays, has been the traditional basis of laboratory-based tumor characterization. Microarray and mass spectrometry analysis enabled comprehensive transcriptional profiling and lead to large-scale proteomics and metabolomics analysis. Scientists hope that with future analyzing of OMICs data, we can increase our therapeutic productivity for molecular targets of cancer therapies. The data of cancer OMICs are rapidly collected and provided an invaluable resource for identifying novel targets in the treatment of cancer, and will accelerate with developed diagnostic technologies and advanced novel methods in near future.