Dr Douglas Levine talks about the Cancer Genome Atlas, a collaborative project between the National Cancer Institute and the National Human Genome Research Institute. This project was designed to catalogue all the genomic changes in glioblastoma, ovarian cancer and lung squamous carcinoma. Dr Levine explains how the genomic changes that are relevant to the cancers are identified, explains how this data can be used to impact clinical practice and outlines the outcomes from the first analysis of the data.