Genomic profiling of liver cancer

Abstract

Development of liver cancers is driven largely by genomic alterations that deregulate signaling pathways, influencing growth and survival of cancer cells. Because of the hundreds or thousands of genomic/epigenomic alterations that have accumulated in the cancer genome, it is very challenging to find and test candidate genes driving tumor development and progression. Systematic studies of the liver cancer genome have become available in recent years. These studies have uncovered new potential driver genes, including those not previously known to be involved in the development of liver cancer. Novel approaches combining multiple datasets from patient tissues have created an unparalleled opportunity to uncover potential new therapeutic targets and prognostic/predictive biomarkers for personalized therapy that can improve clinical outcomes of the patients with liver cancer.

Keywords: gene expression profiling; liver neoplasms; oligonucleotide array sequence analysis.

Fig. 1

Integromics approaches. Genomics data provide long lists of candidate driver genes or proteins. Integration of these independently generated data from the same specimens will greatly improve the chance of identifying real driver genes or therapeutic targets.