Improvement of next-generation sequencing (NGS) has revealed novel driver genes and new therapeutic targets for cancer patients. We summarize here the history of NGS development, current situation of typical analysis pipeline utilizing NGS – especially whole exome sequencing (WES) – whole transcriptome sequencing (WTS/RNA-seq), and useful public databases and tools for NGS data analysis. Large-scale sequencing projects such as The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) have sequenced hundreds of tumor samples of different subtypes to provide catalogues of cancer genome. Chromothripsis, kataegis, and chromoplexy were discovered from those studies using second-generation technologies. Recent novel findings, such as RET gene fusion in lung cancer using these NGS following clinical translation, are also noted here. Clinical sequencing to find personalized treatment strategies for cancer patients has also been done for lung cancer. Mutations of EGFR and ALK are widely applied to screening for administration of EGFR-TKI and crizotinib, respectively. WES – targeting &gt
100s mutation sequencing using NGS – has rapidly become a common way of clinical sequencing. Actionable mutations are used not only as targets of molecular therapy but also as markers for better stratifications in clinical trials.