TCGA Datasplosion

I'm at the TCGA meeting in Washington DC, and am being blown away by the enormous amount of data and complicated analysis of that data. It's phenomenal how much sequencing, morphometric and related data have been accrued in a wide variety of tumor types. The analyses are pretty interesting, but it's also surprising how much previously known biology comes out again and again. I can't tell if people are reporting results that we already know because it's safer, or because there's not much new in the data. Either way, it's clear that for these results to be useful we will need much more clinically relevant annotation and many more tumors. In a future where all patients have sequenced tumors, perhaps we will see much more clinically applicable conclusions.