Ku CS, Cooper DN, Roukos DH. Clinical relevance of cancer genome sequencing. World J Gastroenterol 2013; 19(13): 2011-2018 [PMID: 23599619 DOI: 10.3748/wjg.v19.i13.2011]
Corresponding Author of This Article
Dimitrios H Roukos, Associate Professor, Department of Surgery, Ioannina University School of Medicine, 45110 Ioannina, Greece. droukos@cc.uoi.gr
Article-Type of This Article
Editorial
Open-Access Policy of This Article
This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
World J Gastroenterol. Apr 7, 2013; 19(13): 2011-2018 Published online Apr 7, 2013. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v19.i13.2011
Clinical relevance of cancer genome sequencing
Chee Seng Ku, David N Cooper, Dimitrios H Roukos
Chee Seng Ku, Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institute, SE-17177 Stockholm, Sweden
David N Cooper, Institute of Medical Genetics, School of Medicine, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF14 4YU, United Kingdom
Dimitrios H Roukos, Department of Surgery, Ioannina University School of Medicine, 45110 Ioannina, Greece
Dimitrios H Roukos, Centre for Biosystems and Synthetic Genomic Network Medicine, Centre for BioSystems and Genomic Network Medicine, Ioannina University, 45110 Ioannina, Greece
Author contributions: All authors contributed to the writing of this manuscript, and all of them have read and approved the final version to be published.
Correspondence to: Dimitrios H Roukos, Associate Professor, Department of Surgery, Ioannina University School of Medicine, 45110 Ioannina, Greece. droukos@cc.uoi.gr
Telephone: +30-26510-07423 Fax: +30-26510-07094
Received: June 7, 2012 Revised: September 21, 2012 Accepted: September 29, 2012 Published online: April 7, 2013
Abstract
The arrival of both high-throughput and bench-top next-generation sequencing technologies and sequence enrichment methods has revolutionized our approach to dissecting the genetic basis of cancer. These technologies have been almost invariably employed in whole-genome sequencing (WGS) and whole-exome sequencing (WES) studies. Both WGS and WES approaches have been widely applied to interrogate the somatic mutational landscape of sporadic cancers and identify novel germline mutations underlying familial cancer syndromes. The clinical implications of cancer genome sequencing have become increasingly clear, for example in diagnostics. In this editorial, we present these advances in the context of research discovery and discuss both the clinical relevance of cancer genome sequencing and the challenges associated with the adoption of these genomic technologies in a clinical setting.
