A pathology atlas with an analysis of all human genes in all major cancers showing the consequence of their corresponding protein levels for overall patient survival.

Published in Science, the Atlas is based on the analysis of 17 main cancer types using data from 8,000 patients.

The atlas also shows more that 4,0000 patient survival scatter plots and 5 million pathology-based images.

Professor Mathias Uhlen, Director of the Human Protein Atlas consortium and leader of the Pathology Atlas effort says: “This study differs from earlier cancer investigations, since it is not focused on the mutations in cancers, but the downstream effects of such mutations across all protein-coding genes.

We show, for the first time, the influence of the gene expression levels demonstrating the power of “big data” to change how medical research is performed.

It also shows the advantage of open access policies in science in which researchers share data with each other to allow integration of huge amounts of data from different sources.”

The Pathology Atlas is available via an interactive open-access database.