Giving the right treatments to the right patients at the right time, known as precision medicine, has become the new ideal for effective care. As progress has been made to develop precision medicine, genomic information has been an integral part of the effort. It has been used to differentiate various tumor types by gene transcript abundance and facilitate therapeutic drug selection for patients to have remarkable responses - including complete remissions.
However, for most clinical problems, precision strategies remain aspirational. This is due, in large part, to the many layers of regulation between gene transcription and protein expression, and even further to post-translational modifications. These regulatory layers make it exponentially challenging to identify important biological variances for effective treatment from transcriptional differences alone, and becomes a barrier for optimal intervention and patient care. As a result, precision medicine has yet to deliver for the vast majority of cancer patients.
But as precision medicine develops, the emerging field of proteogenomics provides an opportunity to generate new cancer insights through the melding of genomics and proteomics, allowing a more complete understanding of how somatic genomes activate aberrant signal transduction events that drive cancer pathogenesis. This seminar will discuss how genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics are being combined in the quest to better understand the etiology of cancer – in basic clinical sample studies and translational research (clinical trials). It will also discuss how some of the world’s leading cancer research centers have united around proteogenomics through the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s Cancer Moonshot activities. By comprehensively characterizing commonly diagnosed cancers within their respective populations, these research centers aim to develop and coalesce a public cancer proteogenome atlas representative of the diversity of people with cancer worldwide.