Divide and conquer: progress in the molecular stratification of cancer

Cancer remains an outstanding cause of global morbidity and mortality, despite intensive research and unprecedented insights into the basic mechanisms of cancer development. A plethora of clinical and experimental evidence suggests that cancers from individual patients are likely to be molecularly heterogeneous in their use of distinct oncogenic pathways and biological programs. Efforts to significantly impact cancer patient outcomes will almost certainly require the development of robust strategies to subdivide such heterogeneous panels of cancers into biologically and clinically homogenous subgroups, for the purposes of personalizing treatment protocols and identifying optimal drug targets. In this review, I describe recent progress in the development of both targeted and genome-wide approaches for the molecular stratification of cancers, drawing examples from both the haematopoietic and solid tumor malignancies.