Curating CIViC¶

Introduction to CIViC Curation

With the recent advent of rapid and affordable tumor genome sequencing, interpreting the clinical significance of cancer variants from the wealth of existing and rapidly evolving medical literature has become a major bottleneck to realizing the potential of precision cancer medicine.

Associating cancer variants with concrete clinical actions by manual curation of high quality evidence is a great challenge. Creating useful interpretations requires integrating complex information from diverse sources ranging from preclinical lab experiments to clinical trial results. Creating and maintaining such interpretations will require the concerted effort of many experts at a large scale.

CIViC curators are a community of such experts dedicated to creating and maintaining a knowledgebase clinical interpretations for cancer variants.

Although curators are not required to have any specific training, background or skill set, curator-generated content can only be “Accepted” once it is reviewed by a CIViC Editor. Editors are experts in cancer genomics, oncology, pathology and other relevant fields. This gate-keeper model allows significant contributions from curators with any level of experience while maintaining the quality of an expert-driven resource. Curators can be promoted to Editors once they have demonstrated sufficient understanding of the CIViC data model and requirements for cancer variant interpretation.

CIViC curation involves documenting the published evidence for the clinical relevance of cancer variants. This includes creation of structured CIViC evidence statements for cancer variants, curation of variant coordinates, integration of multiple evidence statements into CIViC assertions, and creation of molecular profile-, variant- and gene-level summaries.

However, even small contributions can make a big impact on how up-to-date and comprehensive the CIViC resource is. Examples of small curation activities include: commenting on existing entries, identifying additional literature sources, improving the wording of a variant interpretation, adding variant IDs or aliases, etc.

Curation Prerequisites

Create an account. Creating an account requires only that you have login credentials for one of our supported Open Authorization (OAuth) providers (currently Google, ORCiD, or GitHub).

For a primer on the fundamentals of cancer variant interpretation, we suggest that new users start by reading the CIViC paper, several recently published Standards and Guidelines that CIViC adheres to wherever possible, and other recommended reading as described below.

Required reading for curators