William Pao, Non Executive Board Member at Immunocore, Adjunct Professor of Pharmacology and Medicine at Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“I’m sad to announce that after 15 years, MyCancerGenome (MCG), the world’s first freely available online tool to enable a genetically informed approach to cancer medicine, has gone offline.
When Mia Levy and I co-founded MCG in 2011, personalized cancer medicine was still in its infancy. Tumor profiling of cancers was only performed at a handful of academic centers across the US, Foundation Medicine had just been founded, and a few targeted therapies associated with specific somatic cancer mutations were available.
Having established tumor profiling at Vanderbilt with panels testing up to 60 different mutations, Mia and I quickly realized that practicing clinicians would need a point-of-care tool to enable them to interpret molecular results and assign therapy, whether approved molecules or ones in clinical trials. Our guiding mantra was that prior to seeing a patient, a busy physician in the clinic would have only 5 minutes to look up genetic results, so the tool needed to be easy to navigate and understand. We also wanted to ensure that users could access such information freely across the globe.
Just before MCG went dark in February 2026, it included content on 900 cancer type, 18,100 biomarker, 2,700 drug, 9,100 clinical trial, and 19 cell-signaling pathway pages. MCG also included a clinical trial search feature populated with a database of clinical trials annotated by diagnosis and molecular eligibility criteria based on ClinicalTrials.gov entries and information about variant prevalence from AACR Project GENIE. At its peak, the website was viewed more than 10,000 times/week, by individuals in 211 countries and territories around the world. MCG also made its content available through a variety of application programming interfaces for use in electronic health records as well as in generation of molecular pathology interpretive reports. MCG was used by millions of visitors to the MyCancerGenome.org web application, and in more than 40,000 next-generation tumor sequencing reports at 31 institutions around the world.
Thanks especially to Christine Micheel and Christine M. Lovly, MD, PhD, FASCO for making MCG a worldwide resource. Thanks also to the many other team members and contributors over the years, and to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for hosting MCG.
Today, tumor profiling has become more routine, and many more resources are available to interpret results. So perhaps, MCG has outlived its intended use. However, it is shocking to note that despite advances in personalized cancer medicine and in particular in EGFR mutant lung cancer, in 2025, nearly one-quarter of patients with advanced NSCLC did not receive an EGFR test in a US health network (Subramanian et al JTO ‘25). Since mutation testing can make a huge difference in the outcomes of patients, what will it take to establish universal routine molecular testing?
If you have ideas on MCG 2.0, please comment in the chat.”
Other articles featuring William Pao on OncoDaily.