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Mother’s death sets twin scientists on journey to find precision cancer therapies

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Their mother’s death when they were teenagers set identical twins Obi and Malachi Griffith on a shared path to find better cancer therapies. Today, the twins, both geneticists and computational biologists at the School of Medicine, are seeking precision treatments for the disease. The Griffith Lab, driven by the twins’ independent and complementary research interests, is a large team of biologists, bioinformaticians, computer scientists and software engineers.

One of the lab’s key developments is a free, open-source database that matches cancer mutations found in patients’ tumors with drugs targeting such genetic errors. The database, called CIViC, stands for Clinical Interpretations of Variants in Cancer. With CIViC, doctors treating unfamiliar forms of cancer can quickly comb the available medical research to find insights for their patients.

See the full article in Washington University’s Outlook Magazine