GenomeWebinars

This webinar presents an in-depth look at how Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center has developed and implemented a next-generation sequencing panel for mutational tumor profiling of advanced cancer patients.

Michael Berger, Associate Director of the Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Center for Molecular Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, discusses the implementation of MSK-IMPACT, an NGS panel that analyzes both tumor and matched normal tissue to detect protein-coding mutations, copy number alterations, and certain promoter mutations and structural rearrangements in cancer-associated genes.

The panel, which currently covers 468 genes, has allowed a large number of patients to enroll in clinical trials of targeted treatments, according to a study published by Berger and colleagues earlier this year based on the results from sequencing around 10,000 patients. The MSKCC team found that around a third of these patients harbored actionable mutations and 11 percent of patients participated in a genomically matched clinical trial based on their results.

Since then, the MSKCC team has profiled a total of 20,000 patients with the panel. Dr. Berger discusses lessons learned from this implementation process, including:

• Considerations in assay design
• Challenges in large-scale implementation
• Integration with informatics systems
• Assessment of clinical utility
• Opportunities for clinical, translational, and basic research

Dr. Nevenka Dimitrova discusses how the Philips IntelliSpace Genomics platform addresses the challenges of implementing molecular profiling panels at healthcare systems with integrated clinical-genomic data, up-to-date variant interpretation and seamless workflow for precision oncology.

This webinar discusses how next-generation sequencing (NGS) can help clinical research labs and pathologists save time, money, and samples compared to single-analyte oncology research assays.

Recent studies estimate that almost 73 percent of cancer treatments in the pipeline may need a genomic biomarker in the next few years. As the list of genomic biomarkers relevant to clinical oncology keeps growing, the ability to detect mutations across hundreds of targets in a rapid, cost-efficient fashion helps pathology research laboratories conserve samples by reducing the need for sequential, single-analyte assays. NGS panels have revolutionized the field of cancer genomics by enabling pathologists and clinical researchers to analyze mutations across multiple genes, in a single assay.

For clinical research or pathology laboratories that are considering adopting NGS in house, it’s important that the chosen solutions are compatible with challenging sample types (such as fine needle aspirates and formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded samples), have an automated wet-lab workflow, and offer plug-and-play bioinformatics capabilities.

During this webinar, Dr. Navid Sadri of the University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center provides an overview of why his pathology lab adopted NGS and how it is being implemented for clinical research. He provides some examples of how NGS helped identify different mutation types and provides relevant results with limited sample input and a rapid turnaround time.

Thereafter, Dr. Jody McIntyre of Thermo Fisher Scientific shows how Oncomine KnowledgeBase Reporter can help pathologists and clinical researchers link cancer variants to labels, guidelines and clinical trials, and generate an easy-to-interpret report in a few simple steps.