AMBAR - Interactive Alteration Annotations for Molecular Tumor Boards

Abstract Background: Providing suitable treatments strategies that take into account cancer specific alterations is a crucial task for successful cancer treatment. To this end, molecular tumor boards (MTBs), that bring together clinicians as well as scientists with diverse expertise, are increasingly established in the clinical routine for therapeutic interventions. Molecular profiling from sequencing data is an integral part of the decision making process of an MTB. To debate variant calling results from next generation sequencing NGS analyses, detailed information about the detected mutations are mandatory. Further, these results need to be combined with knowledge and up to date evidence from databases. At the moment, few tools are available that aim at managing this amount of required information. As a result, the whole process of analysis and documentation of patients data becomes time consuming and difficult to manage for MTBs. Results: To overcome these limitations, we developed an interactive web application AMBAR (Alteration annotations for Molecular tumor BoARds) to visualize not only annotated mutations, but also evidence for possible therapeutic drug targets. Found mutations can be evaluated, discussed and exported to clinical information systems. The application is based on R shiny and allows customization, interactive filtering and visualization.Conclusion: AMBAR is an interactive application to not only support MTBs in decision making, but to act as interface between results of NGS analyses, result visualization and export into clinical information systems.