Welcome to our Erice 2010 meeting on Cancer Omics "From bedside to desktop cancer medicine and backwards: the implementation of omic sciences in the prevention and treatment of human tumors".

High-throughput omic technologies are being established and validated in cancer research aiming to create better predictive models for diagnosis, prognosis and therapy, to identify and characterize key signaling networks and to find new targets for drug development.

This tenth Advanced Meeting of the series on Experimental Oncology and its Clinical Application is addressed to combine and integrate theoretical approaches and resulting data in omic research aiming to:

(a) identify healthy subjects at risk of developing cancer;

(b) define novel nosological cancer entities that could not be revealed by pathological examination;

(c) to recognize new independent prognostic indicators in cancer patients;

(d) assess the probability of response of patients to treatment; and

(e) ultimately pinpoint potential molecular target as a basis to develop personalized measures for prevention and/or therapy.