Cancer Genomics and Diagnostics

Cancer genomics examines the DNA-level changes that drive a normal cell to become malignant and to keep evolving under treatment pressure, reading the somatic mutations, copy-number shifts, and structural rearrangements that accumulate across a tumor's lifetime. Because no two patients' tumors carry identical alterations — and because cells within a single tumor can diverge substantially from one another, a phenomenon called intratumor heterogeneity — matching a therapy to a genomic target remains a moving target rather than a solved problem. A growing body of work focuses on liquid biopsies, which detect cell-free tumor DNA shed into the bloodstream, offering a less invasive and more temporally flexible window into tumor evolution than surgical sampling alone. Central open questions include how to distinguish the mutational signatures that causally drive progression from the vast background of passenger mutations, and how clonal dynamics shift when tumors are placed under selective pressure from targeted drugs or immune surveillance.

Works

99,076

Total citations

1,764,511

Keywords

Cancer GenomicsMutational SignaturesIntratumor HeterogeneityLiquid BiopsiesSomatic MutationsTumor Evolution