Basic sciences discoveries increasingly alter medical though and routine clinical practice. With the advent and refinement of innovative high-throughput technologies, including “omics” and RNA interference and efforts for their use in unbiased studies begins to be influenced oncological practice.
Currently, genomewide association studies have been able to examine interpatient differences in inherited genetic variability at an unprecedented level of resolution, thanks to the development of microarrays, or chips, capable of assessing more 500,000 to 1 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in a single sample. This “SNP-chip” technology capitalizes on a catalogue of common human genetic variations that is provided by the HapMap Project, which was made possible by the completion of the consensus human-genome sequence [1].
