ROBIN

I'm pleased to be able to share our latest preprint - ROBIN. Rapid nanopOre Brain intraoperatIve classificatioN. ROBIN builds on work by many groups and shows how we could reduce turnaround time for full molecular classification of CNS tumours in NHS clinical settings from weeks to hours. The preprint is available now at https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.10.24313398v1 . In this paper we report on 20 retrospective and 50 prospective intraoperative patient samples, providing a classification within 2 hours of sample receipt and a full molecular classification within 24 hours using the unique real time features of Oxford Nanopore Technologies sequencing. We have built on the work of many, but particularly our collaborators Areeba Patel and Felix Sahm from @DFKZ and our earlier work on RAPID-CNS2 (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00401-022-02415-6). Work was driven by clinical need from Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust who have supported us in developing this.

Thanks to Simon Deacon and Inswasti Cahyani for the wet lab protocol and Simon Paine, Mr Stuart Smith and surgeons at Nottingham

and Sebastian Brandner for clinical expertise.

DeepSeq at University of Nottingham School of Life Sciences provided additional technical expertise and informatics. A team effort, but our hope is that this becomes routine as soon as possible!

Most importantly we thank each and every patient who has contributed to our study (and are continuing to do so). Patients are often investing in improvements that will benefit others in the future. We hope we can bring these improvements to patients as soon as possible.

The ROBIN tool is available from https://github.com/LooseLab/ROBIN .