University of Cambridge - Genomics Core

The tools in Genomics help researchers to understand the cancer genome, unravel the genetic causes of cancer and develop new methods for diagnosis, treatment, etc. Cancer genomics has been revolutionised by next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology and the people and instruments in the Genomics core help CI scientists answer their research questions. Microarray technology is still being used for copy-number and differential gene expression, and the core offers access to these and other genomic technologies as required by scientists at the CI.

In the last year it has become possible to sequence the entire genome of a cancer patient using NGS. It is likely to be several years before this technical possibility becomes a clinical tool, however we can now sequence a human genome in around five days and perform unbiased genome-wide experiments to see what the underlying sequence differences are in cancer genomes.