Document Type

Article

Journal Title

Chinese Journal of Cancer

Publication Date

4-1-2013

Volume

32

Abstract

The emergence of a huge volume of "omics" data enables a computational approach to the investigation of the biology of cancer. The cancer informatics approach is a useful supplement to the traditional experimental approach. I reviewed several reports that used a bioinformatics approach to analyze the associations among aging, stem cells, and cancer by microarray gene expression profiling. The high expression of aging- or human embryonic stem cell-related molecules in cancer suggests that certain important mechanisms are commonly underlying aging, stem cells, and cancer. These mechanisms are involved in cell cycle regulation, metabolic process, DNA damage response, apoptosis, p53 signaling pathway, immune/inflammatory response, and other processes, suggesting that cancer is a developmental and evolutional disease that is strongly related to aging. Moreover, these mechanisms demonstrate that the initiation, proliferation, and metastasis of cancer are associated with the deregulation of stem cells. These findings provide insights into the biology of cancer. Certainly, the findings that are obtained by the informatics approach should be justified by experimental validation. This review also noted that next-generation sequencing data provide enriched sources for cancer informatics study.

MeSH Headings

Aging, Apoptosis, Cell Proliferation, Computational Biology, Gene Expression Profiling, Gene Expression Regulation, Neoplastic, Humans, Microarray Analysis, Neoplasms, Neoplastic Stem Cells, Tumor Markers, Biological

ISSN

1000-467X

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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