Current advances on single or multi-omics analysis of esophageal cancer

Abstract

Esophageal cancer is associated with high mortality rates and is one of the cancers with the worst prognosis. Its incidence has significant regional specificity, particularly in China where it is much higher than in other countries. Moreover, effective diagnostic markers, therapeutic targets, and molecular subtyping biomarkers are currently lacking for esophageal cancer. Nevertheless, large-scale omics studies have identified dozens of robust genetic risk loci and prognosis-related loci, drawn genomic, epigenomic, and transcriptomic maps of esophageal cancer at multiple molecular levels, and described significant differences between esophageal squamous cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma. These studies are of great significance for exploring the occurrence and development mechanism of esophageal cancer, guiding clinical treatment, and improving patient prognosis. This review, from the perspective of multi-omics, discusses the analytical strategies employed in these studies and summarizes their core findings. It emphasizes that the integration and analysis of multi-omics data is a key focus and development trend in the precise medical research of esophageal cancer, and has broad research and application prospects.Keywords: Esophageal cancer; GWAS; Precision medicine; Biomarker