Reliability and reproducibility among different platforms for tumour BRCA testing in ovarian cancer: a study of the Italian NGS Network.

Introduction: BRCA tumour testing is a crucial tool for personalised therapy of patients with ovarian cancer. Since different next-generation sequencing (NGS) platforms and BRCA panels are available, the NGS Italian Network proposed to assess the robustness of different technologies.

Methods: Six centres, using four different technologies, provided raw data of 284 cases, including 75 cases with pathogenic/likely pathogenic variants, for a revision blindly performed by an external bioinformatic platform.

Results: The third-party revision assessed that all the 284 raw data reached good quality parameters. The variant calling analysis confirmed all the 75 pathogenic/likely pathogenic variants, including challenging variants, achieving a concordance rate of 100% regardless of the panel, instrument and bioinformatic pipeline adopted. No additional variants were identified in the reanalysis of a subset of 41 cases.

Conclusions: BRCA tumour testing performed with different technologies in different centres, may achieve the realibility and reproducibility required for clinical diagnostic procedures.