Leveraging population-based exome screening to impact clinical care: The evolution of variant assessment in the Geisinger MyCode research project

Exome and genome sequencing are increasingly utilized in research studies and clinical care and can provide clinically relevant information beyond the initial intent for sequencing, including medically actionable secondary findings. Despite ongoing debate about sharing this information with patients and participants, a growing number of clinical laboratories and research programs routinely report secondary findings that increase the risk for selected diseases. Recently, there has been a push to maximize the potential benefit of this practice by implementing proactive genomic screening at the population level irrespective of medical history, but the feasibility of deploying population-scale proactive genomic screening requires scaling key elements of the genomic data evaluation process. Herein, we describe the motivation, development, and implementation of a population-scale variant-first screening pipeline combining bioinformatics-based filtering with a manual review process to screen for clinically relevant findings in research exomes generated through the DiscovEHR collaboration within Geisinger's MyCode (R) research project. Consistent with other studies, this pipeline yields a screen-positive detection rate between 2.8 and 3.3% (depending on inclusion of those with prior indication-based testing) in 103,048 adult MyCode patient-participants screened for clinically relevant findings in 60 genes. Our variant-first pipeline affords cost and time savings by filtering out negative cases, thereby avoiding analysis of each exome one-by-one, as typically employed in the diagnostic setting. While research is still needed to fully appreciate the benefits of population genomic screening, MyCode provides the first demonstration of a program at scale to help shape how population genomic screening is integrated into routine clinical care.

Automated summary

Exome and genome sequencing are increasingly used in research and clinical care to provide clinically relevant information beyond the initial intent for sequencing. There is ongoing debate about sharing secondary findings with patients and participants, but a growing number of laboratories and research programs are reporting such findings. Proactive genomic screening at the population level is being considered, but requires scaling key elements of the genomic data evaluation process. One such program, MyCode, demonstrates the feasibility and benefits of population genomic screening in routine clinical care.