People can be forgiven for thinking that the messages coming out of the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting in Chicago this week seem to conflict. Finishing up today, the meeting hosted nearly 17,000 scientists, exhibitors and guests and had several talks expounding the dizzying pace of genome technologies being applied to cancer diagnosis and treatment. At the same time, some speakers warned of the challenges inherent in doing cancer ‘omics.’
A plenary talk Sunday evening by Elaine Mardis of the Genome Institute at Washington University in St Louis covered her group’s ongoing work to characterize individual patients’ tumours using what she calls deep digital sequencing, which looks at the whole-genome sequence from a patient and his or her cancer and then resequences and verifies individual mutations in DNA and RNA recovered from multiple biopsies. Her methods can show not only differences between cancer cells and normal cells but also how cancer cells change and evolve over time and in response to treatment. She has published recently on this for acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) and for myelodysplastic syndromes that can progress to AML.