Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), a global leader in cancer care, and OpenEvidence, the most popular AI for doctors in the United States, today announced a partnership to advance precision oncology. This partnership includes both integration of OpenEvidence within MSK’s Epic workflow, as well as integrating OncoKB™, MSK’s precision oncology knowledge base, directly into OpenEvidence for its broader use by providers outside of MSK.
Through this integration, OncoKB™ expert knowledge can now be paired with each patient’s clinical context to provide clinical decision support for the most complex oncology cases. The collaboration draws on MSK’s longstanding expertise in precision oncology, codified through OncoKB™ into a structured, accessible database that equips physicians with point-of-care clinical decision support to inform treatment decisions based on the molecular profile of each patient’s individual cancer.
MSK’s OncoKB™ provides evidence-based assertions on whether genetic alterations detected in cancer are clinically actionable biomarkers that may guide subsequent treatment decisions. Its content is curated by a team of oncology and genetics experts who annotate the oncogenic effect and level of clinical actionability of each curated genetic alteration based on FDA drug labels for oncology therapies, professional guidelines, and the scientific literature. In October 2021, OncoKB™ became the first and remains the only somatic cancer variant knowledge base to be partially recognized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and its levels of evidence are aligned with the joint consensus recommendation of the Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP), the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), and the College of American Pathologists (CAP).
“We’re excited that OpenEvidence will widen OncoKB’s reach, bringing MSK’s expert interpretation of a patient’s unique cancer genetics to cancer care providers across the U.S. to help them make molecularly informed treatment decisions,” said Debyani Chakravarty, PhD, Lead Scientist, OncoKB, Kravis Center for Molecular Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. “OncoKB is rooted in its mission to enable universal access to MSK’s expert interpretation of precision oncology data, which is particularly important now as molecular profiling is considered standard care for practically all cancers.”
OncoKB™ organizes that interpretation into a structured, evidence-graded framework, from alterations included as biomarkers in an FDA drug label to those supported by professional guidelines, clinical studies, or compelling biological evidence. Through this partnership, OncoKB’s curated, cancer type-specific annotations that include the oncogenic effect, level of evidence and associated therapies for each alteration will be surfaced within OpenEvidence, within Epic, alongside patient context, so that clinicians asking about a specific alteration can see MSK’s expert assessment of its clinical actionability alongside answers grounded in the peer-reviewed literature.
“AI has the potential to fundamentally change how we translate an increasingly complex and rapidly expanding body of knowledge into better decisions for patients,” said Anaeze Offodile, M.D., Chief Strategy Officer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK). “Realizing that potential requires more than powerful technology—it requires thoughtful integration into how care is delivered. Our work with OpenEvidence reflects MSK’s broader approach to AI: embedding trusted tools into clinical practice in ways that augment the expertise of our clinicians, reduce friction, and ultimately enable more informed, evidence-based care.”
OpenEvidence is trusted by millions of verified U.S. healthcare professionals making high-stakes clinical decisions at the point of care, with evidence that is sourced, cited, and grounded in peer-reviewed medical literature. Today, more than half of U.S. hematologist-oncologists use OpenEvidence to answer their most complex oncology questions. Through this collaboration, every clinician on OpenEvidence gains access to OncoKB™ expert interpretation of cancer genomics, extending MSK’s expertise to cancer care providers nationwide. Further, this flagship partnership launches a first of its kind oncology workflow, uniting OncoKB™ with OpenEvidence’s seamless EHR integration, patient-aware clinical intelligence, and leading medical AI to support MSK clinicians at the point of care.
“Precision oncology has produced an extraordinary amount of knowledge, but that knowledge only helps a patient if the right interpretation reaches the physician at the moment a decision is being made,” said Travis Zack, MD, Chief Medical Officer of OpenEvidence. “OncoKB is the gold standard for making sense of a tumor’s genetics, built and maintained by the experts at MSK who have defined this field. Bringing it into OpenEvidence, within the EHR, with patient context, means a physician anywhere can pair the primary literature with MSK-curated interpretation of exactly which alterations matter and what to do about them, turning a complex genomic report into a clear, evidence-based path forward.”
“Having trained at MSK, I am thrilled for this partnership, which will allow us to democratize the power of MSK’s genomic curation. Soon, patients with cancer all over the world can have their NGS data annotated with the same careful rigor and thoroughness,” said Samyukta Mullangi, MD, VP Clinical Strategy at OpenEvidence.
CONTACT:
OpenEvidence: [email protected]
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center: [email protected]