Although the great majority of cancers share a defined group of hallmarks that is responsible for the uncontrolled growth of particular cell types, it is today clear that under the name of cancer we refer to hundreds of different diseases. Furthermore, each of these diseases has an intrinsic variability due to the genetic background in which it develops. The ability to correctly identify these diseases is urgently needed, because each of them may require a specific therapeutic treatment for successful cure. Cancer biomarkers can be extremely valuable tools for efficient diagnosis and prognosis of cancers. In order to succeed in distinguishing between cancer types and progression-associated genetic backgrounds, cancer biomarkers need to have a strong specificity for a particular disease condition. With the development of novel sequencing technologies, it became clear that the set of genes transcribed from human cells is not limited to genes that code for proteins. On the contrary, our cells contain thousands of RNA without any protein-coding potential. The observation that these transcripts have a much higher cell/tissue specificity of expression in comparison to protein-coding genes makes them a potentially very valuable source of novel cancer biomarkers.
Keywords: Biomarker discovery; Cancer biomarker; Diagnostic; Predictive; Prognostic; lncRNAs.