Between pathways and networks lies context: Implications for precision medicine

Precision medicine, broadly defined as considering individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person in disease prevention and selection of suitable medical intervention, shows strong promise in the treatment of cancer. Selecting therapies is complicated by multiple routes to gene dysregulation, which manifest in the individual patient within the many different types of genomic measurements. Additionally, multiple mutations exist in patients, a phenomenon known as oncogenic collaboration, which further complicates the selection of therapy. In this article, we discuss current approaches using biological pathways and networks to unify the many types of OMICs data. We argue that a contextual approach combining cancer pathways and networks could lead to a proper understanding of the biology of this significant disease.