Functional genomics to identify unforeseen cancer drug targets "…the potential of high-throughput functional genomics to pinpoint gene-targeted therapies … holds tremendous promise."

Just as Google (CA, USA) has revolutionized our ability to search for information, cancer researchers now have the power of functional genomics and high-throughput screening as an efficient search engine for the discovery of cancer therapies.It is clear that gene-targeted therapies will play a major role in the future of cancer treat-ment. DNA sequencing, gene expression pro-filing, proteomics and other large-scale mole-cular analyses have provided an unprecedented global view of the molecular defects in cancer, and promise a revolution in ‘personalized can-cer medicine’. However, these data are largely descriptive and correlative. Identifying which genes to target from the thousands of possibili -ties is a daunting challenge, requiring extensive and laborious follow-up. Why not turn the pro -cess around and start with empirical testing of all possible gene candidates and then integrate those results with the descriptive data we already have? In one step, we could pinpoint the most promising and relevant targets. This functional genetic approach is feasible right now, through the application of RNAi and high-throughput robotics instrumentation. The first indication that cancer could be tar-geted with specific molecules and treated with minimal side effects came in the 1960s with hormone blocking therapies for cancers of the breast and prostate. The success of this approach illustrated that cancers had specific dependen-cies that could be exploited for therapy. More recently, the success of targeted therapies, such as monoclonal antibodies (trastuzumab among others) against HER2 for breast cancer with amplification of the