More than 18,000 Genomic Records from Cancer Patients Available

The publicly available database found nearly a third of samples included mutations targeted by either approved drugs or therapies in clinical trials.

kerry grens
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FLICKR, ADAM NIEMANGenomic information from more than 18,300 patients treated at any of eight academic medical centers in North America and Europe is available for researchers to study. The American Association for Cancer Research GENIE project (for Genomics Evidence Neoplasia Information Exchange) released the data set in January, and in Cancer Discovery today (June 1), the organizers described characteristics of the data, including the types of tumors the patients had, the mutations present, and possible matches with clinical trials.

“The real power of the way this consortium was assembled is that theories can be made of this data and questions formulated, so for patients with a particular rare mutation, maybe you can now see that there are 200 across this dataset, but then you can also look at what happened to those patients,” GENIE steering committee chairperson Charles Sawyers tells GenomeWeb.

The GENIE project started in 2015. The idea behind it is to make available data for researchers to link genomic data with cancer outcomes. The most common tumor types in the data set are non-small cell lung cancer, colorectal cancer, and melanoma.

According to a press release, 30 percent of the samples indicated clinically actionable mutations—with either approved drugs or experimental therapies in ...

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  • kerry grens

    Kerry Grens

    Kerry served as The Scientist’s news director until 2021. Before joining The Scientist in 2013, she was a stringer for Reuters Health, the senior health and science reporter at WHYY in Philadelphia, and the health and science reporter at New Hampshire Public Radio. Kerry got her start in journalism as a AAAS Mass Media fellow at KUNC in Colorado. She has a master’s in biological sciences from Stanford University and a biology degree from Loyola University Chicago.

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