Finding the right genes for disease and prognosis prediction

It is possible to get gene expression data relatively inexpensively from micro-arrays. So, this leads to hope that the genes can tell us who will get or has a disease. Perhaps one can find the stage of the disease to enable effective treatments. However, we are currently at the stage where there are many challenges to evaluating the possibilities for genes to be used in diagnosis and treatment. There are typically many more genes that might be involved than samples for any given disease. Which genes are important and how stable are the choices an algorithm provides? We do not know the time of the true onset of a disease, just sometimes when symptoms started and sometimes when diagnosis was done. Some of the promising work on diagnosis or prognosis has suffered from data or scientific errors. This talk will discuss the problems and pitfalls of using genes to predict disease presence or prognosis. It will also discuss some promising ways to choose the genes that may be predictive for a particular disease, with a focus on cancer, and point out some open questions.