What is COSMIC?

All cancers arise as a result of the acquisition of a series of fixed DNA sequence abnormalities, mutations, many of which ultimately confer a growth advantage upon the cells in which they have occurred. There is a vast amount of information available in the published scientific literature about these changes. COSMIC is designed to store and display somatic mutation information and related details and contains information relating to human cancers.

Some key features of COSMIC are:

• Contains information on publications, samples and mutations. Includes samples which have been found to be negative for mutations during screening therefore enabling frequency data to be calculated for mutations in different genes in different cancer types.
• Samples entered include benign neoplasms and other benign proliferations, in situ and invasive tumours, recurrences, metastases and cancer cell lines.

The mutation data and associated information is extracted from the primary literature and entered into the COSMIC database. In order to provide a consistent view of the data a histology and tissue ontology has been created and all mutations are mapped to a single version of each gene. The data can be queried by tissue, histology or gene and displayed as a graph, as a table or exported in various formats.