A Role for Surgical Pathologists in 'Cytophenomics' and 'Histophenomics'
Chong Jai Kim, Je G. · Journal of Pathology and Translational Medicine · 2009
Rapid advances in molecular biology and bioinformatics have initiated a new era of high-dimensional biology and, now, we are quite familiar with the term ''Omics''.Omics is a general term for a broad discipline of science and engineering dedicated to analyzing the interactions of biological information objects in various ''omes''.These include terms such as genome, proteome, metabolome, expressome, interactome, etc. 1All of omics technology is characterized by simultaneous acquisition of a large amount of data and application of sophisticated data analysis platforms for the interpretation of results, which do not seem to be related to routine surgical pathology practice. 2Therefore, the majority of hospital pathologists may feel that they are running behind modern technology and, also, that these high-dimensional biological approaches are superior to conventional surgical pathology.Particularly, this might be the case for a younger generation of pathologists who are in the middle of their training.They might think that surgical pathology is boring and an out-of-date discipline.In this letter, we would like to argue that surgical pathologists have been applying and leading more sophisticated omics technology for a long time, ahead of other omics technologies, and