ABSTRACT
Cancers arise from the nonrandom accumulation of genomic aberrations that individually provide a varying degree of growth advantage to cells. The acquisition of genomic alterations is facilitated by genomic instability, a process that drives tumor development by increasing the rate of spontaneous mutations in cells. The genomic landscape for most cancers is characterized by frequent mutations in a handful of genes and a low frequency of mutations in a larger set of genes. Cancer genomics refers to an unbiased and systematic analysis of the cancer genome in order to identify specific genetic loci that are recurrently altered in specific cancer types. The goal of cancer genomics is to provide comprehensive characterization of driver mutations and the cancer genes that they alter in order to optimize strategies for cancer prevention, early detection, and therapy. Levine and colleagues performed gene expression profiling of metastatic peritoneal tissue from colon and predominantly low-grade appendiceal cancer cases.
