Microarrays and Colon Cancer in the Road for Translational Medicine

This review covers recent aspects related with microarray technology and their application in colorectal cancer, one of the most prevalent cancers in the world and being one third of cancer related deaths. Since their origin, microarrays have been extensively used in oncological studies with the aim of unravelling the underlying biology of cancer, enabling translational medicine. Some microarray based applications have already been translated into clinics and approved by the regulatory agencies; these applications have been supported by biomedical informatics.

In this work we will present different aspects and views related with microarrays and their applications in colon cancer and the biomedical informatics aspects related with this technology and its applications. The schema followed in this work is based on an introduction to microarray technologies and their applications; translational medicine as a consequence of the different approaches based on microarray technologies; data analysis of microarray data focused on gene expression studies in these applications represents 60% of microarray publications; aspects related with the quality of the experiments and the reproducibility of the analyses and technology; major databases for microarray datasets storage and the standards associated with microarray information; other biomedical informatics aspects different to those strictly associated with microarray data analysis; and finally future trends in microarrays in the scope of the relationship with nanotechnology.