Mining Cancer Arrays with Oncomine

Courtesy of Oncomine

Each week it seems a new study comes out about applying DNA microarrays to cancer. The data are generally publicly accessible, but not conveniently so, as they are scattered about the Web or available only by E-mail.

Arul Chinnaiyan, director of the University of Michigan Pathology Microarray Center in Ann Arbor, decided to collect all the data and put it in a single place, along with some bioinformatics tools to help cancer biologists interpret the information.

The result is Oncomine http://www. oncomine.org, "a bioinformatics infrastructure for the cancer biologist," according to the Web site. With data from 65 studies and 4,700 microarrays, the Web-based tool currently archives more than 47 million measurements, covering everything from breast cancer to the rare salivary adenoid cystic carcinoma. A soon-to-be-released version 2 will sport as many as 100 million data points.

Researchers typically use microarrays to find gene-expression patterns...