Can Bioinformatics Offer a Cure for Cancer ?

The development and application of bioinformatics tools to cancer research is expanding rapidly. This article attempts to highlight a few trends of a very fast developing field that may hold the key to the cure for cancer.

Recent advances in high-throughput methods had led to explosion of data and information on biological systems at different levels, from genomics, proteomics, metabolomics to whole-body physiology. Cancer research is an area where this wealth of information is exploited to create a systems perspective of cancer. Systems biology and bioinformatics have fundamentally changed cancer research, providing an integrated framework for identification and characterization of pathways that are critical to cancer, discovery of new targets for anti-cancer drugs and assessment of toxicity of existing and future therapeutics. It can also help to explain the variations between individual responses to cancer treatments, thus, allowing the development of personalized and optimal treatment for each individual.

One of the major challenges is data preparation and integration; that is the need to obtain high-quality standardized datasets and to integrate different data types obtained in different settings, ranging from molecular biology to clinical trials.
Several development initiatives have been installed in the last decade in order to address this challenge:

caCORE, developed by the National Cancer Institute Center for Bioinformatics (NCICB) in the USA is an open-source suite of common resources for cancer vocabulary, metadata and data management needs. caCore, based on Unified Modelling Language (UML) information models, allows semantic interoperability across several biomedical information system.

caBIG (cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid), a voluntary network created for sharing tools and data, to speed up cancer research