It has been noted for decades that
cancer is essentially a genomic
disease. Benefiting from the latest development of
high-throughput sequencing and
bioinformatics technologies, a variety of genetic alterations have been identified for their
roles in
cancer occurrence and development, giving rise to new opportunities for anti-
cancer drug discovery. In particular, the rapid advancement of
cancer genomics has paved the way for the
precision medicine that has gained compelling
achievement in the past years and significantly benefited
cancer patients. In this
review, we summarize the main types of genomic
abnormalities in
cancer, the application of
functional genomics research in
cancer research, and in particular the translational application of
cancer genomics in
clinical diagnosis,
drug discovery and
cancer precision medicine. With this
review, we
hope to better understand
cancer genomics research and provide
future perspectives for its application in
precision medicine.