2.3 Cancer Diagnostics and Therapy from Molecular Data

The past decade has seen unprecedented progress in the survival chances of cancer patients as a consequence of new treatments targeting tumor-specific cellular processes, which have been uncovered by molecular genetic analyses. From a data analysis perspective, the main challenge is the high dimensionality and multimodality of the genetic data relative to the small sample sizes (numbers of patients). From a computational perspective, the analysis of high volumes of data (about 100 GB of sequencing data for an individual tumor genome) currently requires high-powered computational resources and still remains challenging in the very short time frames that are desired to start treatment immediately.