Dr. Sooryanarayana VaramballyBreast cancer is one of the most common cancers worldwide and is the second leading cause of cancer death among women in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While advances in technologies have improved our understanding of the molecular alterations that occur during breast cancer onset and progression, user-friendly tools for breast cancer data analysis are scarce. To determine effective treatment options, researchers need access to specimen data.

Researchers in the UAB Department of Pathology have developed a comprehensive breast cancer data analysis platform, MammOnc-DB, to address this issue. The platform is comprised of data from more than 20,000 breast cancer samples and offers opportunities in facilitating hypothesis generation and testing, biomarker discovery and therapeutic targets identification. The database includes pre- and post-treatment data, which can help users identify treatment resistance markers and support combination therapy strategies, offering researchers and clinicians a comprehensive tool for breast cancer data analysis and visualizationDr. Darshan Chandrashekar.

Sooryanarayana Varambally, Ph.D., MBA, a professor in the Division of Molecular and Cellular Pathology, is leading the charge. It was his team that created a similar platform, UALCAN, with clinical data from 33 different cancer types, to facilitate broader cancer research on the go.

“UALCAN has become a commonly used cancer data analysis platform,” Varambally said. “It has been cited more than 7,000 time since its inception 9 years ago and has been visited more than 1.65 million times. We wanted to develop a comprehensive data analysis platform that is highly focused on breast cancer. This decision paved the way for MammOnc-DB.”

Varambally’s work on MammOnc-DB was recently published in Nature Portfolio Journal, NPJ Breast Cancer. The disparate breast cancer data were collected from multiple public repositories worldwide to establish a one-stop user-friendly tool for breast cancer data. The platform allows users to select what they’re most interested in, such as gene expression, protein expression, gene regulation and single cell sequencing analysis

Varambally’s team plans to expand MammOnc-DB with additional datasets and functionalities, ensuring that the platform remains a Dr. Santhosh Kumar Karthikeyancutting-edge resource for the global scientific community. Alongside Varambally, Santhosh Kumar Karthikeyan, Ph.D., a graduate student, and Darshan Chandrashekar, M.Sc., Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Division of Genomic Diagnostics and Bioinformatics, are primary authors on the study.

Collaborators with Varambally, Chandrashekar and Karthikeyan on MammOnc-DB project include Upender Manne, Snigdha Sahai, Sadeep Shrestha, Ritu Aneja, Rajesh Singh, Celina G.  Kleer, Sidarth Kumar, Zhaohui S. Qin, Harikrishna Nakshatri and Chad J. Creighton. Israel Ponce-Rodriguez and Pathology Information Services hosts the MammOnc-DB database. This platform, which is free for users, is supported in part by the Department of Pathology, UAB Heersink School of Medicine and the Breast Cancer Foundation of Alabama.