From Information Overload to Actionable Insights: How a National Cancer Research Center Identifies Meaningful Mutations in Somatic Tumor Testing

Precision medicine is transforming cancer care, with next-generation sequencing (NGS) enabling the simultaneous analysis of multiple genomic alterations with therapeutic implications. However, due to the sporadic nature of somatic cancers and the increasing uptake of NGS testing, the number of detected variants is exponentially growing, challenging labs to confidently identify meaningful mutations that could influence or improve decisions at the point of care. Approximately 50 percent of the oncologists in the United States find NGS results sometimes or often difficult to interpret, while 31 percent of small to medium-sized labs in Europe view a lack of knowledge and exposure to routine analyses and interpretation as the most critical bottleneck in NGS testing. In this webinar, Ana Krivokuca will present a real-world use case of how the Institute for Oncology and Radiology of Serbia (IORS), a national cancer research center that provides routine NGS testing for cancer patients, uses the Human Somatic Mutation Database (HSMD) in their NGS testing pipeline to validate, assess, and better understand the clinical significance of detected variants. A new somatic database from QIAGEN, HSMD combines two decades of expert-curated content with data from over 300,000 real-world clinical oncology cases to provide deep genomic insight into the molecular characterizations of a patient’s tumor. Easy to search with new content added weekly, HSMD enables users to explore key genes or mutations with driving properties or clinical relevance, search for associated treatment options, evaluate secondary findings, and develop customized gene panels.

Learning Objectives:

1. Express how IORS uses HSMD to identify actionable variants, analyze complex reports, evaluate secondary findings, and design custom gene panels.

2. Visualize HSMD content and features through a virtual demonstration.

3. Identify a complimentary, five-day trial of HSMD.