Cancer is a disease of genes gone awry, and new insights into the cancer genome could point the way to effective treatments. Looking at these set of genes could provide clues as to what is causing cancer and provide opportunities about developing therapeutic strategies against it.
If you take a 1,000 mutations in kinase genes alone which are putatively associated with cancer and try to figure out how many combinations of these mutations one could have, and then consider that mutations are only the beginning, because it depends on the factors which regulate those genes and how much the genes are expressed or repressed, and how all those things interact with all the other things which are going on, you have a pretty major challenge, if you want to build a model of the cancer cell from the bottom up.
Kinase genes are just the tip of the iceberg though. They are only a miniscule portion of the total cancer genome. The analysis over the long haul are moving away from the kinases into the rest of the genome. All of this bodes well for cancer medicine, which is becoming more tailored to the genetics of a particular patient and his/her particular tumor.
We can take a cancer specimen, analyze it, and follow those genetic changes that influence particular pathways. Then we use one, two, three or more targeted therapies, perhaps simultaneously, and try to completely interrupt the flow of the cancer process.
However, there are some who feel the properties of individual cancer cells are irrelevant to the cure or control of cancer. Cancer is about the properties of evolutionary populations of cells. That implies that the required target for the consistent and specific cure or control of cancer is the set of all malignant cells that could evolve. Targeting a lesser set will fail. It will act as a selective pressure that changes the course, but not the flow of tumor cell evolution.
One of the weaknesses of the existing organizational structure for cancer research is the reluctance to address multiple design features concurrently. Multi-dimensional problems require multi-dimensional solutions and coordinated team efforts.
