Cancer Genomics Assignment
The third assignment is to write an essay on the use of genetic sequence data in cancer treatment. Your essay should be divided into three sections. The first section should cover one example of where an understanding of the molecular basis of a type of cancer has led to a therapy being developed. To give you some direction, Herceptin and Gleevec are two excellent examples that you could consider. The second section should describe the advances that are being made in using new DNA sequencing technologies (such as Illumina sequencing) to sequence cancer genomes and identify driver mutations that can be used to identify potential therapeutic approaches. This section should also describe the advantages and disadvantages of whole genome sequencing, exome sequencing, and transcriptome sequencing for this cancer genome sequencing. The final section should describe the challenges that cancer heterogeneity brings to the use of cancer genome sequencing for identifying treatments.