ABSTRACT
D espite the great body o f knowledge about the pathogenesis o f cancer and the continuous development o f many drugs against cancer, the death rates for the most prevalent cancers are not significantly reduced. In order to improve treatment and reduce the mortality o f cancer, a key challenge is to detect the cancer as early as possible. Over the past decade, many omics technologies (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabonomics) have been developed to identify cancer biomarkers for diagnosis, prognosis and therapy. This chapter focuses on the current applications and future challenges o f metabonomics in cancer biomarker discovery. It is possible to envisage that the specialized equipment for metabonomics-based cancer diagnostics will enter the marketplace to realize personalized healthcare within the next 5-10 years.
