Melissa S. Cline

Cline is currently the program manager for the BRCA Exchange, a platform that shares knowledge on the tens of thousands of BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 genetic variants that could influence a person's susceptibility to breast cancer, particularly on the clinical significance of those variants. One of the challenge in curating the clinical impact of genetic variants is that is the curation often relies on clinical evidence of the variants in patients and their families; to protect patient privacy, most genetic data is siloed, or maintained in closed databases where the data are inaccessible to most researchers. Addressing this problem, Dr. Cline and colleagues devised a "federated analysis" approach to analyze patient data within its secure home repository, gathering new knowledge for variant curation while safeguarding patient privacy. This approach has successfully gathered new variant knowledge from siloed data, advancing the curation of BRCA variants.