Large-scale gene expression analysis in molecular target discovery.

The evolution of simple arrays consisting of a few genes to ones composed of thousands of genes and/or ESTs has allowed investigators unprecedented views of the molecular mechanisms within cells. Due to the enormous quantities of information derived from microarray analysis, new types of problems have surfaced, such as where to store all of the data. The ability to solve database or statistical problems has required the bench biologist to collaborate with database developers, software designers and statisticians to determine solutions for storage, analysis and interpretation of microarray data. The collaborative effort between these extremely diverse disciplines has led to the development of creative database query and gene expression analysis tools, producing significant reductions in the time required by researchers to filter through the datasets and discover the key processes perturbed by the diseases of interest. Both unsupervised and supervised analysis methods have been applied to gene expression data leading to the discovery of novel therapeutic targets and diagnostic markers. Furthermore, tumor classification based on their respective molecular fingerprints has led to the classification of cancer subtypes and the discovery of novel molecular taxonomies that may eventually lead to improved patient stratification and superior therapeutic strategies.