COSMIC: Describing the world's knowledge of somatic mutations in cancer

COSMIC, the Catalogue Of Somatic Mutations In Cancer (http://cancer.sanger.ac.uk/cosmic) is a continual effort to integrate all available information on somatic mutations and other molecular alterations causing every form of human cancer. Being the world’s largest and most comprehensive database of somatic mutations in human cancer, it also provides web-based tools for exploration and interpretation of collected data. The content of the database is primarily obtained from the scientific literature by the team of experienced post-doctoral curators and combined with information from online sources, including the TCGA and ICGC. During thorough & exhaustive manual curation, all the available information about mutations and tumor samples (e.g. disease type, demographic data, treatments) are collected, standardized and integrated to allow for both creation of wide virtual cohorts and large-scale studies, as well as precise analysis at the level of a single sample, gene or mutation. The 87th release of COSMIC (Nov 2018) encompasses 5,992,260 coding mutations and 19,574 gene fusions, curated from 1,403,267 cancer samples, including 35,490 whole cancer exomes/genomes, primarily hand-curated data from 26,494 scientific publications. Additionally, COSMIC describes 1,179,545 Copy Number Variants, 9,147,833 gene expression variants, and 7,879,142 differentially methylated CPGs. In addition to this broad database, COSMIC includes a range of specialized projects highlighting specific aspects of cancer in order to emphasize events with a higher impact in disease etiology. This includes the Cancer Gene Census (http://cancer.sanger.ac.uk/census), which defines and describes genes (currently 719) and their dysfunctions driving oncogenesis, and characterizes their impact on hallmarks of cancer. COSMIC3D (http://cancer.sanger.ac.uk/cosmic3d) provides an interactive view of cancer mutations in the context of 3D protein structures, and predicts potential drug-binding sites. Significantly updated 4 times a year, COSMIC is available free-of-charge for academic and non-profit users via COSMIC webpage (http://cancer.sanger.ac.uk/cosmic) or to download through COSMIC downloads (http://cancer.sanger.ac.uk/cosmic/download). Citation Format: Simon Andrew Forbes, david beare, charalampos boutselakis, sally bamford, kate noble, claire rye, john tate, chai yin kok, charlie hathaway, laura ponting, christopher ramshaw, raymund stefancsik, samantha thompson, bhavana harsha, nidhi bindal, shicai wang, steven jupe, helen speedy, celestino creatore, peter fish, sari ward, charlotte cole, elisabeth dawson, zbyslaw sondka. COSMIC: Describing the world’s knowledge of somatic mutations in cancer [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2019; 2019 Mar 29-Apr 3; Atlanta, GA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2019;79(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 906.