{"doi":"10.1002/pmic.201800393","title":"Cancer Omics: Adding Understanding to Knowledge","abstract":null,"journal":"PROTEOMICS","year":2019,"id":689328,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":null,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":false,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":null,"fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":483045,"name":"Hubert Hondermarck","orcid":"0000-0003-3807-2985","position":0,"is_corresponding":false}],"reference_count":0,"raw_metadata":{"has_enrichment":true,"resolved":true,"title":"Cancer Omics: Adding Understanding to Knowledge","abstract":"“Knowledge is not understanding. You can know a lot about something and not really understand it.” This quote from Charles F. Kettering (USA, mid-20th century) applies very well to the cancer challenge. Cancer has been known and described since the antiquity.1, 2 Hippocrates (400 BC) first used the world “Karkinos” or crab, in reference to the appearance of tumors and associated blood vessels resembling a crab's legs reaching out. Karkinos later became carcinomas and the corresponding Latin word cancer is nowadays widely used. Cancer research has basically been going on for 24 centuries and has produced a lot of knowledge about the disease, in epidemiological, clinical, cellular, and molecular terms, but our understanding of cancer is still limited. As a consequence, cancer incidence and mortality keep progressing. Not only we are not able to effectively predict who will get the disease, but also early detection is still an issue and the current treatments have a rather limited efficacy with about 50% of cancer patients still dying of the disease in the 21st century. Cancer often recurs and ultimately spreads to the entire body, and here again our ability to understand how and why it does this is limited. More understanding is needed. The first scientific theory to explain cancer was proposed by Hippocrates who attributed it to the excess of black bile.1, 2 He thought that human diseases were caused by a disequilibrium between several body fluids: blood, lymph, yellow bile, and black bile. This humoral theory of cancer explained why removing the tumor had little chance to cure the disease (the modern concept of relapse) as the black bile would ultimately reconstitute a tumor.3 Whereas the middle ages did not seem to have produced much new ideas to explain cancer (probably too busy building magnificent Gothic cathedrals), at the Renaissance, the lymph theory was developed, which stated that cancer was caused by fermenting and degenerating lymph.1, 2 This was followed in the 19th century by the blastema theory, conceptualizing that cancer developed from budding elements (blastemas), resulting from abnormal interactions between tissues in the body. Around the same period, the theories of chronic irritation, trauma, and infectious disease were also proposed to explain tumor initiation and progression. Although it should be noted that these previous theories provided elements of understanding that are still valid today, since the second half of the 20th century our under standing of cancer has been dominated by gene theory. Driver mutations and epigenetic changes that affect the expression and function of proto-oncogenes and tumor suppressors push cells toward a cancerous genotype and phenotype, and accordingly the gene theory of cancer is now the cornerstone of our current understanding of malignancies. The role of metabolism (initially discovered by Otto Warburg, Nobel Prize 1931) and the tumor microenvironment, as illustrated by the newly described role of neurogenesis in cancer,4 are increasingly regarded as important. However, despite relevant questioning of the predominance of the gene theory,5 the medical and scientific community almost unanimously consider cancer as essentially caused by the deregulation of proto-oncogenes and tumor suppressors. In this context, as the sequencing of the human genome was being progressively completed, it became increasingly apparent at the end of the 20th century that the gene theory of cancer could continue to provide a theoretical basis to understand cancer only if the protein component (the functional outcome of gene expression) was included. Thus, cancer proteomics was born. In about two decades, the inclusion of proteomics with genomics, broadly called proteogenomics,6 and the extension of the field to metabolomics (the study of metabolic products), has led to the development of Cancer Omics, a common integrative framework. Cancer Omics is rapidly expanding; according to PubMed, >5600 studies on cancer proteomics alone have been published and the trend of Cancer Omics related publications is increasing each year. So clearly, more knowledge about cancer is being gained, but will Cancer Omics significantly improve our general understanding of cancer? Although no one can objectively answer this question at this point in time, this special issue of Proteomics showcases what Cancer Omics can achieve and has achieved so far, and the elements of understanding that it adds to the existing body of knowledge on cancer. The different contributions selected in this special Issue range from genomics and proteomics, to glycomics, metabolomics, and bioinformatics, and illustrate current progresses and challenges in the field. The translational aspects of Cancer Omics, for the identification and validation of new cancer clinical biomarkers and tumor molecular signature, and therapeutic targets for precision oncology, are also described in this special issue. Adding understanding to knowledge is clearly a goal of Cancer Omics and the target for the coming year. This special issue is an attempt to contribute to this effort to shed more light on cancer toward the final understanding of this disease. The study was financially supported by The University of Newcastle, the Hunter Cancer Research Alliance, and the Maitland Cancer Appeal Committee. The author declares no conflict of interest.","is_dataset_classified":null,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"views":0,"has_version_chain":false,"is_dataset":false,"is_oa":false,"pmid":"31556228","pmcid":null,"openalex_id":"https://openalex.org/W2975352755","authors":[],"funders":[{"funder_name":"Hunter Cancer Research Alliance","grant_id":"","title":null}],"total_grants":1,"fwci":0.0,"citation_percentile":0.13056611,"influential_citations":0,"citation_trend":[],"oa_status":"bronze","license":"http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/termsAndConditions#vor","oa_locations":[{"url":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/pmic.201800393","host_type":"journal"},{"url":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/pmic.201800393","host_type":"publisher"},{"url":"https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1002%2Fpmic.201800393","host_type":"publisher"},{"url":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/pmic.201800393","host_type":"publisher"},{"url":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full-xml/10.1002/pmic.201800393","host_type":"publisher"},{"url":"https://analyticalsciencejournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/pmic.201800393","host_type":"publisher"},{"url":"https://doi.org/10.1002/pmic.201800393","host_type":"journal"},{"url":"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31556228","host_type":"repository"}],"fields_of_study":["Cancer, Stress, Anesthesia, and Immune Response","Empathy and Medical Education","Science, Research, and Medicine","Genomics","Humans","Metabolomics","Neoplasms","Proteomics"],"mesh_terms":["Humans","Neoplasms","Genomics","Proteomics","Metabolomics"],"keywords":["Cancer","Disease","Medicine","Pathology","Internal medicine","Cancer Systems Biology","Cancer Proteomics","Cancer Metabolomics","Cancer Transcriptomics","Cancer Multi-omics"],"sdg_mappings":[{"sdg_number":0,"sdg_label":"Good health and well-being"}],"linked_datasets":[],"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"database_accessions":[],"source":"live","citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-08-20T17:28:36.249365Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}