The challenge for precision medicine: all tumor genomes are different and all cancer patients are different in their own way

Cancer is currently viewed as a disease of evolving genomic instability and abnormal epigenomic modifications. Pioneering work had discovered and chromosomally mapped the genomic locations of oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes that are responsible for cancer initiation, progression and metastasis. By the time the feasibility of the Human Genome Project was being discussed in the early 1980s, cancer research was already facing two options: “either to try to discover the genes important in malignancy by a piecemeal approach or to sequence the whole genome of a selected animal species” (1).