PLOS Medicine: Open Access to Large Scale Datasets Is Needed to Translate Knowledge of Cancer Heterogeneity into Better Patient Outcomes

"Cancer is a heterogeneous disease, which is comprised of a collection of diseases traditionally categorized by tissue type of origin. A distinct set of etiologic causes, treatments, and prognoses are associated with different cancers, and even within a given tissue type, cancer shows significant variability in molecular and clinical features across patients. This interpatient heterogeneity is a major rationale for large-scale research efforts (such as The Cancer Genome Atlas [TCGA] and the International Cancer Genome Consortium [ICGC]) to comprehensively profile the molecular landscape of patient cancer samples across all major cancers [1,2]. These efforts have been bolstered by the recent development of new genomic [3] and computational [4] technologies to enable increasingly detailed and comprehensive analyses of the molecular landscape of solid cancers. It is hoped that the comprehensive molecular characterization of large sets of cancer samples will lead to the identification of new therapeutic targets and the development of improved personalized therapies for cancer patients ..."