Interpreting microarray data: towards the complete bioinformatics toolkit for cancer.

Functional genomics has been applied in the study of human malignancies since the inception of this field nearly a decade ago. Microarray analysis has been specifically used in an attempt to re-classify carcinomas at the molecular level, to aid in diagnosis/prognosis and to predict how various types of tumour respond to different therapeutic agents. Bioinformatics is now at the forefront of the post-genomics era and is providing a number of tools with which to mine the large datasets produced by genome-wide analysis.