Interested in learning the relationship between cancer treatment and William Pollard’s quote, “Information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision making, it is a burden, not a benefit”? Keep reading…

In 2001, Imatinib became the first FDA-approved drug to successfully target genetic mutations associated with the initiation or progression of cancerous tumors. Since then, hundreds more targeted therapies have been released and new research continues, making the flow of information impossible for any one doctor or researcher to track. To make it easier to access the most accurate treatment information, Memorial Sloan Kettering (MSK) Hospital brought together a project team of cancer biologists and software engineers to create OncoKB, a knowledge base of cancer-causing mutations. The project was ranked #27 on the Project Management Institute’s list of Most Influential Projects for 2022.

OncoKB is developed and maintained by three primary teams. The first team is the Clinical Genomics Annotation Committee which is composed of MSK doctors who are experts in a wide range of cancers. Their input allows each mutation to be classified according to the strength of the data that support that mutation as a cancer predictor. The database is also supported by the second team, a team of software engineers who collaborate with cancer researchers and clinicians. This software infrastructure allows OncoKB content to be seamlessly delivered to multiple outputs, such as medical sequencing reports, the publicly available interface or to other websites. Finally, the third team are the Project Managers. This group manages all the tasks and resources, as well as ensuring everyone involved is correctly oriented and trained, and overseeing the execution of each task until it is completed.

OncoKB is the first database of its kind to achieve FDA partial recognition, meaning that the database is considered a scientifically valid tool to interpret the usefulness of tumor mutations for predicting drug responses (FDA recognizes Memorial Sloan-Kettering database of molecular tumor marker information | FDA). Its audience consists of cancer researchers, clinical oncologists, molecular pathologists and test developers. Doctors working at hospitals other than MSK can license OncoKB for use with their patients, and scientists who use the database for academic lab research can do so for free.

OncoKB was developed as a tool to ultimately make patients’ journey with cancer easier (OncoKB: A Precision Oncology Knowledge Base | JCO Precision Oncology (ascopubs.org)). Through regular updates from the project teams, it continues to fulfill its mission to provide accurate and up-to-date treatment information. In doing so, it fulfills Pollard’s dictum to make that potentially lifesaving information not a burden, but a benefit for scientists, patients and doctors.

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