Functional Genomic Characterization of Cancer Genomes
- Thomas P. Howard1,2,
- Francisca Vazquez1,2,
- Aviad Tsherniak2,
- Andrew L. Hong1,2,3,
- Mik Rinne1,2,
- Andrew J. Aguirre1,2,
- Jesse S. Boehm2 and
- William C. Hahn1,2
- 1Department of Medical Oncology, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02215
- 2Broad Institute of Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142
- 3Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts 02115
- Correspondence: William_Hahn{at}dfci.harvard.edu
Abstract
International efforts to sequence cancer genomes now provide an overview of the major genetic alterations that occur in most human cancers. These studies have identified many highly recurrent alterations in specific cancer subtypes but have also identified mutations that occur at lower frequency and unstudied variants of known cancer-associated genes. To elucidate the function of such cancer alleles, we have developed several approaches to systematically interrogate genomic changes found in human tumors. In general, we have taken two complementary approaches. In the first approach, we focus on perturbing genes identified as mutated, amplified, or deleted by cancer genome annotation efforts, whereas in the second, we have taken an unbiased approach to identify genes that are essential for cancer cell proliferation or survival in cell lines that are extensively annotated to identify context-specific essential genes. These studies begin to allow us to define a cancer dependencies map.
- © 2016 Howard et al.; Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
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