Editorial-Omics and Cancer Biomarkers: Link to the Biological Truth or Bear the Consequences

The search for clinically relevant tissue and body fluid–borne biomarkers has never been more important to the war on cancer. New-omic technologies can mea-sure hundreds to tens of thousands of analytes at once. The field is intoxicated with the prospect of coupling these platforms, and the derived data,with sophisticated bioinformatics. The outcome promises to herald a revo-lutionary systems biology era for cancer research and clinical implementation. Electronic medical records, national biobanking initiatives, large-scale epidemiolog-ic studies, new rapid sequencing tools, sophisticated gene expression analysis, and advances in protein arrays and mass spectrometry (MS), provide the hope that we can reach a new level of molecular understanding con-cerning carcinogenesis, cancer progression, and drug