Background Cancer is one of the leading causes of death in India. About 80-90% of all cancers are sporadic (caused by somatic mutations), with the remaining 5-10% account for hereditary cancer syndromes (germline mutations). Treatment decisions in Cancer are increasingly informed by the results of molecular genetic testing.

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) is one of the most significant technological advances in the field of molecular diagnostics over last decade and is now matured to the point where it is being considered by many clinical laboratories across the world as a standard molecular diagnostic test especially to determine the tumor mutational status of multiple genes simultaneously.

The current genetic tests for Cancer in India are based on old technologies like FISH and PCR that mainly look at single gene mutations in patientâ€TMs tumor profile. Quite a few Hospitals and Pathology labs in India (e.g. Tata Memorial Hospital, Apollo Hospital, SNGene Lab, etc.) are adopting the NGS technology for clinical diagnostics. With the advances in NGS the major bottleneck in identification of actionable mutation in a patient’s tumor sample is no longer the sequencing (wet-lab portion), but rather the sequence analysis and interpretation (dry portion).

OncoNGx Genomic Workbench will be the first such NGS based somatic cancer analysis and annotation platform that will democratise the use of NGS technologies in cancer care and empower physicians to utilize a patient’s genomic profile to improve clinical decisions.