Standardization of Tumor Mutational Burden by Alignment to Reference Standards

In this episode, Victor Weigman, Director of Translational Genomics at Q Squared Solutions and Mark Stewart, Vice President of Science Policy at Friends of Cancer Research (FOCR) joined to talk about standardization of TMB measurements by alignment to reference standards.

TMB differs from other biomarkers such as PDL1 in that:

"...we're leveraging next generation sequencing to generate a composite score from tens of thousands or in some cases millions of bases of sequence. So really you're summarizing this collection of mutations in a singular value versus a more qualitative range of expression levels done by looking at proteins in a microscope. - Victor Weigman

One challenge is that as treatments are being developed, the thresholds for the diagnostics are out of sync. Friends of Cancer Research understands the difficulty of harmonizing assays to a standard after FDA approval. For that reason, there is strong interest in harmonizing the results of different assays to a standard reference set.