An international effort towards developing standards for best practices in analysis, interpretation and reporting of clinical genome sequencing results in the CLARITY Challenge

By C. Brownstein, Alan H. Beggs, N. Homer, Barry Merriman, Timothy W. Yu, Katherine C Flannery, E. Dechene, Meghan C Towne, Sarah K. Savage, Emily N Price and 187 more. Genome Biology, 2014

308 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There is tremendous potential for genome sequencing to improve clinical diagnosis and care once it becomes routinely accessible, but this will require formalizing research methods into clinical best practices in the areas of sequence data generation, analysis, interpretation and reporting. The CLARITY Challenge was designed to spur convergence in methods for diagnosing genetic disease starting from clinical case history and genome sequencing data. DNA samples were obtained from three families with heritable genetic disorders and genomic sequence data were donated by sequencing platform vendors. The challenge was to analyze and interpret these data with the goals of identifying disease-causing variants and reporting the findings in a clinically useful format. Participating contestant groups were solicited broadly, and an independent panel of judges evaluated their performance. A total of 30 international groups were engaged. The entries reveal a general convergence of practices on most elements of the analysis and interpretation process. However, even given this commonality of approach, only two groups identified the consensus candidate variants in all disease cases, demonstrating a need for consistent fine-tuning of the generally accepted methods. There was greater diversity of the final clinical report content and in the patient consenting process, demonstrating that these areas require additional exploration and standardization. The CLARITY Challenge provides a comprehensive assessment of current practices for using genome sequencing to diagnose and report genetic diseases. There is remarkable convergence in bioinformatic techniques, but medical interpretation and reporting are areas that require further development by many groups.

Subfields: Genetics, Pathology and Forensic Medicine

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f6cfc2a3f10930aeb73f61b5c6499a83c39e2a1d

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Citations in the corpus

• M-CAP eliminates a majority of variants of uncertain significance in clinical exomes at high sensitivity (2016, unknown): “Whole-exome sequencing for the diagnosis of Mendelian diseases is now a routine part of medical genetics clinical practice 1–3 , but variant interpretation remains a serious challenge 4,5 .”
• Settling the score: variant prioritization and Mendelian disease (2017, background): “This fact is demonstrated by the 2012 CLARITY Challenge 82 , in which multiple groups interpreted the exomes of three parent–child trios, yielding inconsistent findings among the resulting variant reports.”
• Genomic variant annotation and prioritization with ANNOVAR and wANNOVAR (2015, background): “…CLARITY report (an international effort toward developing standards for best practices in analysis, interpretation and reporting of clinical genome sequencing results), 52% of the clinical genome sequencing laboratories and 63% of the finalists used ANNOVAR to find disease-related mutations 23 .”