Description

Cancer is usually the result of genetic alterations acquired over a lifetime that enable a tumor to grow and spread. As a result, each tumor is unique and involves a complex combination of mutations--a part of the reason that cancers can be so hard to treat. To better understand the characteristics of these diseases and discover appropriate treatments, institutions have comprehensively profiled the genomic changes across thousands of people's tumors. That data is available for anyone with the right skills to analyze. In this class, we will delve into the world of the genomics of cancer, as a way to learn how cancers develop, how molecular profiling technologies generate data about these cancers, and how bioinformatics approaches can harness these data to gain insight and discover treatment.