The Molecular Pathology of Cancer: From Pan ‐genomics to Post‐genomics

Abstract As the cancer genomics of most major cancer types have been comprehensively catalogued over the past decade through a variety of national and international efforts, the delineation of cancer subtypes has been refined, and our understanding of critical cancer drivers and of the potentially targetable vulnerabilities they create has grown tremendously. The 2018 Annual Review Issue of The Journal of Pathology provides in‐depth assessments of how these pan‐genomic approaches have enabled advances in cancer classification, targeted therapy selection, and assessment of cancer progression, all of which are now genomically informed, using several cancer types as examples. Beyond these areas of by now conventional pan‐genomic tumor analysis, there are also reviews of diverse “post‐genomic” areas such as the analysis of circulating free tumor DNA in plasma, concurrent germline cancer predisposition profiling in the setting of apparently sporadic cancer, genetic alterations in epigenetic control and DNA repair, proteomics of tumor heterogeneity, computational pathology, and the roles of the cellular stress response and the microbiome in human cancers. As we are able to derive more and more biologically useful information from diverse human biospecimens, these many advances are informing and transforming the practice of cancer pathology.
Source: The Journal of Pathology - Category: Pathology Authors: Tags: Invited Review Source Type: research