Professor Alistair Forrest is an expert in transcriptomic (gene expression) analysis and as scientific coordinator of the FANTOM5 consortium led an international team to global maps of human promoters, enhancers, microRNAs and long non-coding RNAs. These are landmark resources that are being used world-wide to build transcriptional regulatory networks, understand the effect of regulatory variant polymorphisms and for identifying cancer biomarkers. Recently it was announced that Professor Forrest would lead a multi-disciplinary team of over 40 scientists and clinicians based in Western Australia to apply single-cell sequencing to study a diverse collection of tumour samples to ask questions on tumour heterogeneity, the relationship between primary, metastasis and circulating tumour cells, resistance and recurrence, the tumour microenvironment and biomarker identification. This work is supported by funds from the Cancer Research Trust and Cancer Council WA. Additionally the facility is supported by a grant from the Australian Cancer Research Foundation.