2. Cancer and biomarkers

In recent years, cancer has become the leading cause of death, overtaking cardiovascular disease. It is the cause of a third of male deaths and a quarter of female deaths. In 2012 in France, 355,000 new cases of cancer were diagnosed, and 148,000 people died from it.

Cancer is a disease in which certain abnormal cells multiply anarchically, acquiring the ability to infiltrate and destroy healthy tissue to form a tumor. New sequencing technologies have revealed a complex network of genetic alterations present in cancer cells and absent from healthy cells. Depending on the alterations present, the prognosis and response to treatment may differ. As a result, early detection of these alterations now makes it possible to propose the most appropriate treatment, within the framework of so-called "targeted" therapies.