"Bottom line, CKB implementation is very transformational for your workflow, depending on how you’re doing things in the lab. It has a great framework for curation and data structure, and you can learn a lot just by looking at it. It also creates a competitive advantage - improving turnaround time, physician satisfaction, and overall impact.” - Lucas Santana dos Santos, PhD Assistant Professor of Pathology & Director of Bioinformatics
Northwestern Medicine is a high-volume academic medical center that performs more than 20,000 NGS tests each year, with a primary focus on oncology. As part of its comprehensive cancer center, the institution combines clinical diagnostics, clinical trials, and research, supported by a molecular diagnostics lab. To strengthen its precision oncology program and deliver timely, actionable insights, Northwestern Medicine turned to Genomenon’s Cancer Knowledgebase (CKB) FLEX, an integrated, evidence based solution designed to power both clinical workflows and research initiatives.
CKB FLEX chosen as the top content resource. Why? Extensive clinical trial coverage, professionally curated, well-structured content, therapeutically actionable, updated daily.
Measured Impact:
Phase 1 - Pilot: start with fusions to build confidence on a smaller scale.
Phase 2 - Pipeline integration: use CKB FLEX as a rescue layer; begin with a subset, review early insights.
Phase 3 - Validation and scale: format validation, then expand to more variant types and tumor types, set ongoing QA and determine cadence for content import.
What is CKB FLEX?
CKB FLEX is a downloadable, professionally curated oncology knowledgebase for scalable, flexible integration into clinical and research workflows.
Why it Matters
Increased complexity and volume from next generation sequencing combined with a limited content source can lead to missed treatment opportunities. CKB FLEX solves this issue, centralizing comprehensive content that includes functional variant interpretation and therapeutic options across solid tumors and hematologic cancers.
Entities: Genes, variants with AMP/CAP/ASCO tiering, efficacy evidence (clinical and preclinical), clinical trials, drugs, drug classes.
Variant types: SNVs, indels, frameshifts, nonsense, CNVs, fusions, expression. Other biomarkers: TMB, MSI, HRD, TILs.
Evidence types: Actionable, prognostic, diagnostic, risk factor.
Tumor types: Standardized terminology leveraging the Disease Ontology.
Regulatory approvals & Guidelines: Global drug approvals including FDA and EMA; NCCN, ESMO, ESMO-PAGA.
Published literature and conference abstracts: PubMed, AACR, ASCO, ESMO.
Clinical Trials: Trials are manually curated from clinicaltrials.gov, covering 39 countries.
CKB FLEX integration enables users to confidently identify potential treatment options using molecular eligibility at scale, matching patients to targeted therapies, immunotherapies, and recruiting clinical trials.
We help provide insights into key genetic drivers of diseases and relevant biomarkers. By working together to understand this data, we enable scientists and researchers to make more informed decisions on programs of interest. To learn more about how we can partner together to find your genomic variant solutions, we invite you to click on the link below.
