AACR precision medicine series: Highlights of the integrating clinical genomics and cancer therapy meeting

The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Precision Medicine Series "Integrating Clinical Genomics and Cancer Therapy" took place June 13-16, 2015 in Salt Lake City, Utah. The conferencewas co-chaired by Charles L. Sawyers form Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, ElaineR. Mardis form Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and Arul M. Chinnaiyan fromUniversity of Michigan in Ann Arbor. About 500 clinicians, basic science investigators, bioinformaticians, and postdoctoral fellows joinedtogether to discuss the current state of Clinical Genomics and the advances and challenges of integratingNext Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies into clinical practice. The plenary sessions and paneldiscussions covered current platforms and sequencing approaches adopted for NGS assays of cancergenome at several national and international institutions, different approaches used to map and classifytargetable sequence variants, and how information acquired with the sequencing of the cancer genome isused to guide treatment options. While challenges still exist from a technological perspective, it emergedthat there exists considerable need for the development of tools to aid the identification of the therapymost suitable based on the mutational profile of the somatic cancer genome. The process to match patientsto ongoing clinical trials is still complex. In addition, the need for centralized data repositories, preferablylinked to well annotated clinical records, that aid sharing of sequencing information is central to beginunderstanding the contribution of variants of unknown significance to tumor etiology and response totherapy. Here we summarize the highlights of this stimulating four-day conference with a major emphasison the open problems that the clinical genomics community is currently facing and the tools most neededfor advancing this field.