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Making the right calls in precision oncology

Nature Biotechnology volume 36, pages 692–696 (2018)Cite this article

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Expert curation at present remains the only reliable solution for interpretation of mutation information in the clinical practice of oncology.

According to the US Precision Medicine Initiative (http://bit.ly/2L2y5Qo), precision medicine should now be moving into the office of every oncologist. And yet, for many clinicians, keeping pace with rapid advances in our knowledge of relevant mutations and the vast amount of data being reported in the literature can be overwhelming, preventing efficient delivery of relevant high-quality data to the point of care. Here, we argue that expert curation is currently the only approach that provides a consistent and accurate clinical interpretation that is backed by defendable and transparent reason and evidence. In addition to being insightful and accurate, expert curation, with the assistance of software and a curated knowledge base, can provide the most relevant answers for clinical care while remaining economical and fast.

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Figure 1: The typical workflow of precision data processing.
Figure 2: Number of unique variants in selected biomarkers curated for NSCLC patients by N-of-One, as of November 14, 2017.
Figure 3: Three primary approaches are being taken to scale and interpret the vast amount of tumor genetic data generated: crowdsourcing, AI, and expert curation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. N-of-One, Inc., Concord, Massachusetts, USA

    Kathryn D Bungartz, Kristen Lalowski & Sheryl K Elkin

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  1. Kathryn D Bungartz
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  2. Kristen Lalowski
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  3. Sheryl K Elkin
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kristen Lalowski.

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Competing interests

K.D.B., K.L., and S.K.E. are employees of N-of-One.

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Bungartz, K., Lalowski, K. & Elkin, S. Making the right calls in precision oncology. Nat Biotechnol 36, 692–696 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.4214

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