MUSTARD—a comprehensive resource of mutation-specific therapies in cancer

Abstract

The steady increase in global cancer burden has fuelled the development of several modes of treatment for the disease. In the presence of an actionable mutation, targeted therapies offer a method to selectively attack cancer cells, increasing overall efficacy and reducing harmful side effects. However, different drug molecules are in different stages of development, with new molecules obtaining approvals from regulatory agencies each year. To augment clinical impact, it is important that this information reaches clinicians, patients and researchers swiftly and in a structured, well-annotated manner. To this end, we have developed Mutation-Specific Therapies Resource and Database in Cancer (MUSTARD), a database that is designed to be a centralized resource with diverse information such as cancer subtype, associated mutations, therapy offered and its effect observed, along with links to external resources for a more comprehensive annotation. In its current version, MUSTARD comprises over 2105 unique entries, including associations between 418 unique drug therapies, 189 cancer subtypes and 167 genes curated and annotated from over 862 different publications. To the best of our knowledge, it is the only resource that offers comprehensive information on mutation-specific, gene fusions and overexpressed gene-targeted therapies for cancer. Database URL: http://clingen.igib.res.in/mustard/

Understanding the prevalence of germline oncogenic biomarker variants across the Indian population

“…We have previously compiled MUSTARD 9 , an exhaustive compendium of mutation-specific therapies in cancer. We queried both mutations as well as structural variants present in the database across OncoKB, and analyzed the variants that returned annotations.…”

“…We also query GUaRDIAN 8 , a nation-wide collaborative research initiative dedicated to the study of rare diseases to establish the presence of biomarkers across multiple cohorts. Finally, we compare our results with those obtained by cross referencing the MUSTARD 9 resource, a database of mutation-specific therapies in cancer.…”