Computational tools in inferring cancer tissue-of-origin and molecular classification towards personalized cancer therapy, Volume III

Book excerpt: Our second Research Topic in this series, Computational tools in inferring cancer tissue-of-origin and molecular classification towards personalized cancer therapy, Volume II (https://fro.ntiers.in/14361) has over 8 accepted articles and further manuscripts currently under review. Due to the continued success of these Research Topics and the interest in the subject, we will launch a third volume on the same topic. Inferring cancer tissue-of-origin and molecular classification are two critical problems in personalized cancer therapy. It is known that there are about 5% cancers of unknown primary (CUP) site. These kinds of patients are under empirical chemotherapy, which leads to a very low survival rate. Thus, it is important to infer cancer tissue-of-origin. However, experimental methods usually fail to identify the exact tissue-of-origin even after the death of a patient, which provides a need for computational methods especially in the era of big biomedical data. Based on the finding that gene expressions of metastasis cancer cells are more similar to those of original tissue than metastasis tissue, there have been a few computational methods developed in this area. However, the accuracy of the methods is yet to be improved to assure a clinical usage. In addition to CUP, inferring cancer tissue-of-origin is also important in avoiding misdiagnosis even if the cancer origin is known.