Future Directions in Clinical Cancer Research

The future of cancer research is a rapidly changing space that is increasingly defined by multiple, converging technological trends. Advances in engineering are facilitating the development of experimental techniques that sensitively probe molecular information that was previously inaccessible or prohibitively expensive to develop. These methods often generate enormous amounts of data, requiring new strategies and infrastructure for rapidly storing, querying, and retrieving information for researchers to study. New analytical techniques have risen in parallel to enable researchers to combine and extract biological and clinical insights from this exploding collection of information. This chapter explores many of the emerging tools and concepts that are essential to future cancer research. These analyses are referred to as “omics” because they capture information about the genome, transcriptome, metabolome, or other “-omes.” Omics analyses require unique toolsets, and each is frequently the sole focus of entire textbooks. The goal for this chapter is to introduce the critical background for understanding each of these topics, provide a conceptual overview of the typical tools and analytic techniques required to perform the analyses, and highlight some of the example applications and emerging trends in cancer research and clinical practice.