Every human being came from a single cell. While that fact may not be so obvious in our day-to-day routine, the power of a single cell is observed with the burst of research activity in stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells (and also see the Nobel Prize winner for 2012 in Physiology or Medicine, Shinya Yamanaka, who discovered the reprogramming process). In cancer research, the concept of cancer stem cells has developed into a major effort into identifying and characterizing circulating tumor cells (“CTC’s”) by which metastatses occurs. This was a major topic of discussion at the Spring 2013 AACR meeting in Washington DC, as well as a recent Next Generation Dx meeting (also in Washington DC). In many other areas of human disease biology, the inherently heterogeneous nature of tissues in general point to the need to analyze biology at a much finer resolution.
