Pathway Analysis for Cancer Research and Precision Oncology Applications.

With the advent of OMICs technologies, several bioinformatics methods have been developed to infer biological knowledge from such data. Pathway analysis methodologies help integrate multi-OMICs data and find altered function in known metabolic and signaling pathways. As widely known, such alterations promote the cancer cells' progression and the maintenance of the malignant state. In this chapter, we provide (i) a comprehensive description of the primary data sources for omics data, cancer "omics" projects, and precision oncology knowledge bases; (ii) a survey of the main biological pathway databases; (iii) and a global view of the principal pathway analysis tools and methodologies, describing their main characteristics and shortcomings highlighting their potential applications in cancer research and precision oncology.