Drug resistance and inadequate response to commonly administered drugs across different therapeutic indications poses a major challenge to clinicians and researchers. This leads to unnecessary heath care costs and is incurring additional research expenditure. Despite marked improvement in new therapies, many patients experience progression of disease or disease recurrence asserting the need for early detection of drug response/resistance by evaluating biomarkers. Certain biomarkers are predictive of drug response and possess high potential for use in general clinical applications for personalized medicine.
Although choosing the right biomarkers associated with drug response and drug resistance presents a major challenge to researchers, it is essential for helping design effective patient stratification strategies. Excelra’s GOBIOM (Global Online Biomarker Platform) helps in understanding clinical implications of genetic alterations and their relationship with gene-drug-disease system by interpreting scientific literature. The GOBIOM biomarker database collates genomic variation data from disparate sources and stores them in a highly structured and easily accessible forms to help researchers gain new insights into tumor biology and predict patients’ responses to treatment.
Variant analysis platform in GOBIOM to query gene variants
The variant analyzer platform in GOBIOM enables the user to study variants within the context of the gene and visualize the gene variant data in UCSC genome browser. The Gene coordinate from the database in GRCh37 or GRCh38 format for example, would be the input parameter in UCSC genome browser, which has various annotation tracks beneath genome coordinate positions, allowing for rapid visual correlation of different types of genomic data.
The 'Chromosomal View Tool' in GOBIOM enables search of gene variants by Entrez ID, Chromosome number and Disease name
Gene variants in GOBIOM are represented as a three layered chromosomal view where, the outer layer represents chromosome number, the middle layer represents GRCh38 genomic build and the inner layer represents GRCh37 genomic build. Curated data pertaining to gene variants can be accessed by clicking on the gene coordinate data points in the chromosomal view visualization.
In this manner, focused biomarker databases like GOBIOM can be a very useful resource to identify biomarkers predictive of drug response or resistance, further facilitating selection of right patient population who are most likely to respond to treatment.
