Section 1: Introduction
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What is cancer? Cancer represents a group of diseases or tumors that trigger abnormal cell growth and have the potential to spread to many parts of the body. A cancer usually starts with mutations in one or more ”driver genes” which are genes that can drive tumorigenesis. These mutations are called driver events, meaning that they provide a selective fitness advantage for the individual; other mutations that don’t provide a fitness advantages are called passenger mutations.
The main objective of cancer genomics is to generate a comprehensive catalog of cancer genes and path- ways. Many cancer genome projects have been started within the last ten years (mainly due to the drop in genome sequencing costs); for example, the Cancer Genome Atlas was started in 2006 with the aim of analyzing 20-25 tumor types with 500 tumor / normal pairs each via a large number of experiments (SNP arrays, whole-exome sequencing, RNA seq, and others). The ICGC (international cancer genome consortium) is a bigger, umbrella organization that organizes similar projects around the world with the end goal of studying 50 tumor types with 500 tumor/normal types each.