One-Sided Matching Portal (OSMP): A Tool to Facilitate Rare Disease Patient Matchmaking

Genomic matchmaking-the process of identifying individuals with overlapping phenotypes and rare variants in the same gene-is an important tool facilitating gene discoveries for unsolved rare genetic disease (RGD) patients. Current approaches are two-sided, meaning both patients being matched must have the same candidate gene flagged. This limits the number of RGD patients eligible for matchmaking. One-sided matchmaking, in which a gene of interest is queried in the genome-wide sequencing data of RGD patients, would make matchmaking possible for previously undiscoverable individuals. However, platforms and workflows for this approach have not been well established.

We released a beta version of the One-Sided Matching Portal (OSMP), a platform capable of performing one-sided matchmaking queries across thousands of participants stored in genomic databases. The OSMP returns variant-level and participant-level information on each variant occurrence (VO) identified in a queried gene. A workflow for one-sided matchmaking was developed so that researchers could prioritize the many VOs returned from a given query. This workflow was tested through pilot studies where two sets of genes were queried in over 2500 individuals: 130 genes that were newly associated with disease in OMIM and 178 novel candidate genes that were not associated with a disease-gene association in OMIM. These pilots returned a large number of initial VOs (12,872 and 20,308, respectively); however, the workflow filtered out over 99.8% of these VOs prior to review by a participant's clinician. Filters on participant-level information, including variant zygosity, participant phenotype, and whether a variant was also present in unaffected participants, were effective at reducing the number of false positive matches.

As demonstrated through the two pilot studies, one-sided matchmaking queries can be efficiently performed using the OSMP. The availability of variant-level and participant-level data is key to ensuring this approach is practical for researchers.