“School of Biological Sciences”
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| Paper IPM / Biological Sciences / 15339 |
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The role and relative importance of intrinsic and
extrinsic factors in the development of complex diseases such as
cancer still remains a controversial issue. Determining the amount of
variation explained by these factors needs experimental data and
statistical models. These models are nevertheless based on the
occurrence and accumulation of random mutational events during
stem cell division, thus rendering cancer development a stochastic
outcome. We demonstrate that not only individual genome
sequencing is uninformative in determining cancer risk, but also
assigning a unique genome sequence to any given individual (healthy
or affected) is not meaningful. Current whole-genome sequencing
approaches are therefore unlikely to realize the promise of
personalized medicine. In conclusion, since genome sequence differs
from cell to cell and changes over time, it seems that determining the
risk factor of complex diseases based on genome sequence is
somewhat unrealistic, and therefore, the resulting data are likely to be
inherently uninformative.
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