How expert-curated cancer data from COSMIC and HSMD can help biopharmaceutical researchers identify and validate targets faster and optimize clinical trial design.
The Catalogue Of Somatic Mutations In Cancer (COSMIC) and the Human Somatic Mutation Database (HSMD) are two expert-curated somatic databases exclusively licensed through QIAGEN that enable biopharmaceutical researchers to avoid pitfalls in early cancer drug discovery, confidently qualify candidate drug targets, and accelerate indication expansion and repurposing of existing cancer therapies.
While similar, both databases differ in their applications. Whereas COSMIC is a downloadable database best suited for exploratory research that can be integrated into your pipeline to identify and validate candidate drug targets, HSMD is a searchable database best suited for finding real-world data to support clinical development and post-market research.
In this blog, we provide an in-depth look at how you can use both COSMIC and HSMD throughout your cancer drug discovery and development pipeline.
While similar, COSMIC and HSMD differ in their applications for cancer drug discovery and development. As a result, biopharmaceutical researchers can use both databases to support different workflow stages.
COSMIC and HSMD differ in terms of content, curation, function and application. The below graphic provides a high-level overview of the two databases.
How COSMIC supports exploratory research in cancer drug discovery
Developed and maintained by Wellcome Sanger Institute, the latest release, COSMIC v99 (December 2023), includes over 6 million coding mutations across 1.5 million tumor samples, curated from over 29,000 publications. In addition to coding mutations, COSMIC covers all the genetic mechanisms by which somatic mutations promote cancer, including non-coding mutations, gene fusions, copy-number variants and drug-resistance mutations.
Data is translated into a standardized format and available through downloadable datasets and user-friendly data exploration tools.
How HSMD supports cancer drug clinical development and post-market research
A relatively new somatic mutation database from QIAGEN (released in 2019), HSMD combines over two decades of expert curation and data from scientific literature, on- and off-label therapies and clinical trials, and real-world clinical oncology cases. In the latest release, HSMD 3.0 (November 2023), the database contains manually curated, detailed molecular information on over 1.8 million somatic variants, with more than 430,000 observed in real clinical cases, as well as data from over 545,000 real-world clinical oncology cases.
COSMIC and HSMD are two expert-curated databases licensed exclusively through QIAGEN that enable biopharmaceutical companies to improve the drug discovery process, develop more effective clinical trials, and enhance the treatment of rare cancers. To learn more about how your research team can use COSMIC and HSMD, visit our product webpage or click the button below for a free trial and personal consultation with our biopharmaceutical research experts.
