The University of Vermont Health Network Standardizes on Genomenon’s Mastermind Genomic Search Engine

The University of Vermont Health Network Uses Mastermind to Accelerate Genomic Variant Interpretation

ANN ARBOR, Michigan – June 26, 2018 – Genomenon announced today that the University of Vermont Health Network has selected Genomenon’s Mastermind Genomic Search Engine as their standard for searching medical literature for variant interpretation within the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine.

The Genomic Medicine Program at the UVM Health Network, an integrated health care network, needed a standardized, scalable process for searching the medical literature for genomic variant interpretation. In the past, the laboratory physicians used variable sets of tools, including PubMed, to investigate the clinical relevance of genomic variant calls. In building the Genomic Medicine Program, the UVM Health Network team chose the standardization and scalability of medical interpretation in an effort to yield the same search results for every physician signing out genomic results, and scale with the growth of their case load.

The Genomic Medicine team at the UVM Health Network wanted a tool that provided confidence that the variant annotation search process was thorough and fully vetted by the scientific literature regarding clinical relevance. The Mastermind Genomic SearchEngine was the only tool that satisfied these requirements. Mastermind delivers consistent search results regardless of the way that a disease, gene, or variant is described. This most thorough search of relevant genomic literature available on the market provides the physicians in the Genomic Medicine Program at the UVM HealthNetwork with assurance for decision-making.

“The process of searching the medical literature to annotate the clinical relevance of genomic variants was not standardized in the past,” said Dr. Nikoletta Sidiropoulos, Medical Director of Genomic Medicine at the UVM Health Network. “Genomenon delivers a solution to effectively standardize the way we are now searching the medical literature in our clinical practice. Our medical interpretation process is further standardized using Mastermind.”

Mastermind’s intuitive interface allows biologists, clinicians, and pathologists to quickly identify relevant references that support medical variant-to-gene-to-disease relationships. Starting with simple questions such as “has a variant been published in the literature, and if so, does it have a functional impact?”, one can quickly determine whether a variant has been sequenced in a particular tumor. The medical interpretation process in the Genomic Medicine Laboratory at the UVM Health Network, newly standardized to include Mastermind to search the scientific literature, is a practice improvement to efficiently communicate the clinical relevance of genomic results, with supporting evidence, to oncologists to expedite clinical care or clinical trial enrollment.