Specification for a cBioPortal-based platform to support the Molecular Tumor Board published

Clinicians in molecular tumor boards (MTB) are confronted with a growing amount of high-throughput sequencing data. Today, at German university hospitals, these data are usually handled in complex spreadsheets from which clinicians have to obtain the necessary information. A subgoal of the MIRACUM Use Case 3 („From Knowledge to Action – Support for Molecular Tumor Boards„) was to gather a comprehensive list of requirements to be met by cBioPortal to support processes in MTBs according to clinical needs. cBioPortal is a platform that provides functions to – among others – analyze and visualize Next Generation Sequencing data and was selected as the foundation for the future implementation of the requirements identified.
To achive this goal, oncology experts at nine German university hospitals were surveyed in two rounds of interviews and in preparation for this a scoping review of possible relevant tools was conducted. For visual support in the second round, screenshot mockups illustrating the requirements from the first round were created. In the end, 24 requirements with sometimes several conceivable options were identified and 54 screenshot mockups were created. Some of the identified requirements have already been suggested to the community by other users or are currently being implemented in cBioPortal. This shows, that the results are in line with the needs expressed by various disciplines. According to our findings, cBioPortal has the potential to significantly improve the processes and analyses of an MTB after the implementation of the identified requirements.

The results of this very successful MIRACUM-wide collaboration have just been peer reviewed and published in the journal Diagnostics (https://doi.org/10.3390/diagnostics10020093).
In the meantime we have started to implement the most important and still missing functions for MTB in cBioPortal.

(The picture was adopted from the original publication and slightly modified.  Example data were adopted from the public cBioPortal (https://cbioportal.org) and OncoKB (https://www.oncokb.org/).)