Abstract 3211: Evolution of the CIViC knowledgebase for community driven curation of clinical variants in cancer
Authors: Danos Arpad , Krysiak Kilannin , Barnell Erica K. , Coffman Adam C. , McMichael Joshua F. , Kiwala Susanna , Spies Nicholas C. , Sheta Lana M. , Pema Shahil P. , Kujan Lynzey , Clark Kaitlin A. , Anderson Sydney , Wollam Amber , Li Brian , Guerra Justin , Rao Shruti , Ritter Deborah I. , Grisdale Cameron J. , Raca Gordana , Wagner Alex H. , Madhavan Subha , Griffith Malachi , Griffith Obi L. 
Published: September 2020

With increasing adoption of next generation sequencing into clinical practice, the problem of clinical interpretation of tumor variants arises as a bottleneck for patient care, as effective annotation of these variants draws from a constantly increasing body of largely unstructured clinical and preclinical results. One model to sustain clinical variant curation is to house variant annotation behind a paywall, using access fees to fund further curation effort. An alternate approach is to leverage public curation and expert moderation to create a free public resource to house and distribute this knowledge. The Clinical Interpretation of Variants in Cancer (CIViC, www.civicdb.org) knowledgebase employs the latter approach, and is a free and open-access public resource with an intuitive user interface and flexible public API for programmatic access to all content, which is available to the public with no restrictions on usage. All data is available for retrieval without login, while registration with a free account is required to contribute curation. The provenance of all curation and revision in CIViC is viewable through the web interface, and curators may also leave public comments on all content. Selected expert editors review and revise submitted content, which is clearly labeled as accepted once it has fully undergone moderation. All content in CIViC adheres to a structured data model which follows a published standard operating procedure for curation. This data model incorporates ontologies, standards and guidelines from across the field to promote interoperability and compatibility with other efforts. The CIViC interface also allows curators and organizations to track and display summary statistics of all their activity. CIViC currently has a community of over 190 curators and 16,000 clinical and research users around the world.

CIViC continually develops and improves both new and existing features in response to user feedback as well as collaborative and internal development goals. Recently, the drugs and treatment terms used in predictive/therapeutic annotation have been normalized to the NCI Thesaurus. A conflict of interest (COI) statement is now required for all CIViC Editors, and functionality for writing and displaying the COI has been built into the interface. CIViC employs Predictive (Therapeutic), Prognostic, Diagnostic, Predisposing evidence types, and we highlight the recently introduced Functional evidence type, which has seen continued development. We will present the rationale for these changes including demonstrating how adding a Dominant Negative term better supports curation of functional genomics data sets. A focus of functional curation has been TP53, with over 50 evidence items to date. With multiple use cases for this type of data including targeted therapeutics, identification of relevant hotspots, or characterization of cancer driver mechanisms, functional evidence can be used to support conventional concepts of clinical utility and expand the CIViC data model. These developments provide a mechanism for discussion and integration of functional data into somatic variant interpretation guidelines, an area being explored but lacking expert consensus.

Citation Format: Arpad Danos, Kilannin Krysiak, Erica K. Barnell, Adam C. Coffman, Joshua F. McMichael, Susanna Kiwala, Nicholas C. Spies, Lana M. Sheta, Shahil P. Pema, Lynzey Kujan, Kaitlin A. Clark, Sydney Anderson, Amber Wollam, Brian Li, Justin Guerra, Shruti Rao, Deborah I. Ritter, Cameron J. Grisdale, Gordana Raca, Alex H. Wagner, Subha Madhavan, Malachi Griffith, Obi L. Griffith. Evolution of the CIViC knowledgebase for community driven curation of clinical variants in cancer [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research 2020; 2020 Apr 27-28 and Jun 22-24. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2020;80(16 Suppl):Abstract nr 3211.