PCAWG

The Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium is a collaboration between the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). It produced whole-genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancers across 38 tumor types.

Gerstung et al. (2020) used the PCAWG dataset to reconstruct the life history and evolution of mutational processes and driver mutation sequences, representing the largest single study of cancer evolutionary history to date. Key findings included the constrained set of early driver genes, the ~40% frequency of mutational spectrum shifts during tumor evolution, and evidence that driver mutations often precede diagnosis by years or decades.