Figure 1.

Cancer biology functional genomics. (A) Timeline highlighting the findings leading up to the identification of the RNAi pathway in mammalian cells and the subsequent development of RNAi‐based methods for the study of cancer biology. (B) A schematic representation of the topics discussed in this perspective. The ability to manipulate gene expression via the posttranscriptional gene silencing mechanism, RNAi, has enabled interrogation of cancer signaling pathways and cancer‐specific dependencies and further provided new avenues for the development of cancer therapeutics. C. elegans, Caenorhabditis elegans; CRISPR, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats; RNAi, RNA interference; shRNA, short hairpin RNA; siRNA, small interfering RNA