Data mining The Cancer Genome Atlas in the era of precision cancer medicine

The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) has given researchers and clinicians unprecedented access to many different cancers through multiple platforms that include exome sequencing, comparative genomic hybridisation (CGH) arrays, DNA methylation arrays, RNA sequencing, reverse protein phase arrays (RPPA), and clinical features. Most data are available to the public in their raw and processed forms; however, analysis and interpretation of these data require specialised training and software. To address this problem, online tools such as cBioportal, canEvolve, GDAC fire-hose, PROGgeneV2, and UCSC Cancer browser have been developed by various groups to explore and perform analyses on the datasets that are easily understandable by basic researchers and clinicians. In this mini-review, we give an overview of the datasets available from TCGA and the public tools available for integrative analysis of survival with the genomic and transcriptomic datasets, and introduce a tool being developed by our group to analyse the datasets within TCGA.