Sleeping Beauty mutagenesis: exploiting forward genetic screens for cancer gene discovery

Sleeping Beauty (SB) is a powerful insertional mutagen used in somatic forward genetic screens to identify novel candidate cancer genes. In the past two years, SB has become widely adopted to model human pancreatic, hepatocellular, colorectal and neurological cancers to identify loci that participate in tumor initiation, progression and metastasis. Oncogenomic approaches have directly linked hundreds of genes identified by SB with human cancers, many with prognostic implications. These SB candidate cancer genes are aiding to prioritize punitive human cancer genes for follow-up studies and as possible biomarkers or therapeutic targets. This review highlights recent advances in SB cancer gene discovery, approaches to validate candidate cancer genes, and efforts to integrate SB data across all tumor types to prioritize drug development and tumor specificity.