Chin Lynda, Gray Joe W
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, 44 Binney Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.
Nature. 2008 Apr 3;452(7187):553-63. doi: 10.1038/nature06914.
Cancer cells have diverse biological capabilities that are conferred by numerous genetic aberrations and epigenetic modifications. Today's powerful technologies are enabling these changes to the genome to be catalogued in detail. Tomorrow is likely to bring a complete atlas of the reversible and irreversible alterations that occur in individual cancers. The challenge now is to work out which molecular abnormalities contribute to cancer and which are simply 'noise' at the genomic and epigenomic levels. Distinguishing between these will aid in understanding how the aberrations in a cancer cell collaborate to drive pathophysiology. Past successes in converting information from genomic discoveries into clinical tools provide valuable lessons to guide the translation of emerging insights from the genome into clinical end points that can affect the practice of cancer medicine.
癌细胞具有多种生物学能力,这些能力是由众多基因畸变和表观遗传修饰赋予的。当今强大的技术能够详细记录基因组的这些变化。未来可能会带来一份关于个体癌症中发生的可逆和不可逆改变的完整图谱。现在的挑战是弄清楚哪些分子异常导致了癌症,哪些仅仅是基因组和表观基因组水平上的“噪音”。区分这些将有助于理解癌细胞中的畸变如何协同驱动病理生理学。过去在将基因组发现的信息转化为临床工具方面取得的成功提供了宝贵的经验教训,以指导将基因组学的新见解转化为能够影响癌症医学实践的临床终点。