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TQuest, A Web-Based Platform to Enable Precision Medicine by Linking a Tumor's Genetic Defects to Therapeutic Options

Peter Gershkovich1, James Platt1, Joshua Knopf1

  • 1Peter Gershkovich, Joshua Knopf, Lajos Pusztai, Christos Hatzis, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven; James Platt, Biomantica, West Haven, CT; Marios K. Tasoulis, The Royal Marsden National Health Services Foundation Trust, London, United Kingdom; and Weiwei Shi, Origimed, Shanghai, China.

JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics
|January 18, 2019
PubMed
Abstract

Insights

TQuest software translates cancer genomic variants into targeted therapy options. It identifies FDA-approved and experimental treatments from clinical trials, aiding precision medicine.

Area of Science:

  • Bioinformatics
  • Computational Biology
  • Genomics

Background:

  • Limited software exists to link cancer genomic alterations to treatment strategies.
  • A need for tools to identify targeted therapies based on tumor DNA sequencing is critical for precision oncology.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To develop and evaluate the TQuest platform for translating molecular abnormalities into potential cancer treatment options.
  • To create a reliable software solution for identifying targeted and experimental therapies using tumor DNA sequencing data.

Main Methods:

  • The TQuest platform integrates a data layer (clinical trials, curated mutation-drug associations), a data acquisition layer (crawling clinicaltrials.gov, FDA labels), and a web-based user interface.
  • Users upload genomic variants, tumor morphology, and diagnosis; the system searches and ranks therapeutic options based on relevance.

Main Results:

  • Manual curation yielded 368 genomic variants, 162 gene targets, and 863 drug-target interactions.
  • The platform indexed ~80,000 clinical trials and identified 276 potential drugs for 73 metastatic breast cancer cases (1-103 drugs per patient).

Conclusions:

  • TQuest successfully identified all FDA-approved drugs and routine indications, plus numerous experimental treatments from clinical trials.
  • The TQuest prototype is available online, with open-source code, facilitating its adoption in clinical practice.

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