Prognostic and Predictive Biomarkers in Cancer

Abstract

With the recent emergence of novel technologies, the field of biomarker discovery has been the subject of intense research and activity. Major advances in cancer control will be greatly aided by early detection for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer in its pre-invasive state. Cancer being a diverse disease involves alterations in three classes of genes viz. (proto) oncogenes, tumour suppressor genes and DNA repair genes offering a wide variety of opportunities for the development of biomarkers. The emergence of innovative technologies in genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and imaging allows researchers to facilitate inclusive analysis of cancer cells. These approaches have already demonstrated its power to discriminate cancer cells from normal cells and to identify specific genetic elements involved in cancer progression. Cancer evolves via manifold pathways and is a culmination of a variety of genetic, molecular and clinical events. In the past few years, several reports have led to identification of novel cancer signatures via high throughput biology. Current review gives an overview of the bioinformatics tools, cancer database and available software package tools and further summarizes about different strategies involved in Omics research (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics) for the development of cancer biomarkers. We also discuss about the current and emerging biomarkers in breast cancer with fundamental insight into different markers used in breast cancer detection. In addition, we focus upon the systematic integration of various omic data for accelerating cancer biomarker discovery with evidence based cancer management. The above strategies may lead to significant improvement in cancer screening, prognosis and management of therapeutic response in cancer patients.