‘The definitive property of individuality at the organismal level lies in the effective suppression of the differential propagation of subparts as a necessary strategy for maintaining functional integrity... This suppression has been so effective, while the consequences of failure remain so devastating, that human organisms have coined a word for the cell lineage’s major category of escape from this constraint, a name with power to terrify stable human organisms beyond any other threat to integrity and persistence–cancer.’(Gould, 2002, p. 695)

This chapter will chart a path of knowledge discovery, bringing together cutting edge experimental and computational methods in order to advance our understanding of the structure and dynamic function of biological systems underpinning cancer phenotypes. The aim is to provide a comprehensive overview of a very large area of current research and to highlight key developments and challenges (it is not intended as a detailed review of any of the specialist areas discussed and the reader is referred to the many excellent reviews and the primary literature for in-depth study). The past decade has seen the ascendance of high-throughput methods for measuring the global expression of different biological components–genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, glycomics, metabolomics. Cancer researchers were among the first to extensively deploy these ‘omic’technologies, and the wealth and breadth of available data (see Table 1.1 for on-line access to genomic and transcriptomic data) and technologies now make the