Ephesus - A Curated Content Knowledgebase For The Clinical Interpretation Of Genomic Variants.

Abstract Accurate and comprehensive interpretation of genomic variants has become a bottleneck in clinical sequencing applications due to the implementation of precision oncology and the growth of biomedical findings. We therefore were motivated to build Ephesus, a framework enabling curation of predictive, prognostic and diagnostic evidence for clinical biomarkers in somatic cancers. Currently Ephesus is the primary content source for Roche NAVIFY Mutation Profiler (RUO). The Ephesus' data model ensures adherence to best practices in the field of clinical genomic content curation. Somatic variant classification followed the AMP guidelines. Approvals and recommendations from regulatory agencies and clinical practice guidelines were applied on a regional basis. The data model is mapped to a set of relational tables. Strategies such as data normalization according to standard ontologies, a submit-review-approval workflow with change logs, and biologically relevant data constraints are adopted to enforce data integrity. Ephesus is deployed as a web application whose UI allows users to conduct edits, sorting, filtering, and bulk operations on entities attributes. In order to minimize the manual effort and maximize content coverage, a number of inference rules are applied before the content is ingested into NMP. Currently Ephesus is developed to guide data collection, browsing and summarizing related to primary entities such as Biomarkers, Evidence items, Genes, Variants, Variant groups, and Drugs. The content from 10/28/20 snapshot contains 233k biomarker profiles (including biomarker combinations), in the context of 17 major cancer types. To evaluate the clinical reporting value of the curated knowledge, ~60k clinical cancer patient samples from the AACR GENIE project were queried against Ephesus. Compared our results against those from 3 other major knowledgebases (snapshotted at the same time as Ephesus), we see the performance of Ephesus/NMP exceeds all these knowledgebases. Patients% with at least one interpretation (numbers in parenthesis include matching by inferences)KnowledgebaseVariantVariant & diseaseTier I variant & diseaseEphesus53 (91)40 (89)19 (25)CGI3573CIViC402215ClinVar452313 Citation Format: Jian Li, Lili Niu, Fnu Kinshuk, Bernie Chu, John Mu, Nicole Greene, Vivian Douglas, Caitlin Schartner, Kalpana Kannan, Priyanka Rao, Shuba Krishna. Ephesus - A curated content knowledgebase for the clinical interpretation of genomic variants [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2021; 2021 Apr 10-15 and May 17-21. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2021;81(13_Suppl):Abstract nr 169.