Cancer cartography

A CANCER, put simply, is a gang of rogue cells multiplying out of control. But each gang is different, so “cancer” is actually a term that embraces hundreds of specific ailments propelled by an even larger number of genetic and epigenetic traits. The old ways of characterising it, by the anatomical site of its debut (kidney, for example, or prostate gland) and the histology of its cells, seem increasingly out of date. Instead, thanks to genomics, researchers have unprecedented information on the molecular changes which propel it. The challenge is making sense of those data and putting them to use.