The Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer (COSMIC), based at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, has launched a new feature that will allow users to see which drugs are available to target specific cancer mutations. This new resource is a positive step towards making precision oncology possible for all cancer patients.
The COSMIC Mutation Actionability in Precision Oncology product, known as Actionability, will allow users to search drugs that target somatic mutations at all stages of drug development, including those still in development, in clinical trials or that have been repurposed.
Manually curated by a team at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, COSMIC includes comprehensive data from more than 37 million somatic mutations across the genome, spanning 1,500 types of cancer. It integrates data on multiple different types of mutation seen in cancer genes and genomes, as well as data on gene expression, gene function and 3D protein structure. Users can view or download the data in multiple ways.
Knowing which mutations a tumour needs to survive, and which drugs can target those mutations, is the key to precision oncology. The new Actionability resource identifies relationships between types of cancer, specific mutations and available drugs, providing users with robust, detailed and up to date information about the current range of targeted precision medicine drugs, along with many still under experimental trials.
Dr Zbyslaw Sondka, Science team leader at COSMIC, based at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said: “COSMIC Actionability is another important step in our development as the world’s highest quality and most comprehensive public resource in precision oncology. In this field, we first need to know which mutations drive cancer, and secondly what we can do about those mutations. While COSMIC is a key resource for mutation analysis, Actionability will help us to answer the second question and support development across the full patient journey, from analysis to therapy.”
