MSK and OpenEvidence Announce Two-Way Oncology AI Integration

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and OpenEvidence announced a partnership on September 16, 2026, that pairs the integration of OpenEvidence’s medical AI platform into MSK’s Epic electronic health record workflow with the integration of OncoKB, MSK’s precision oncology knowledge base, directly into OpenEvidence for broader use by providers outside MSK.

How the Integration Works at the Point of Care

The partnership includes both the integration of OpenEvidence within MSK’s Epic workflow and the integration of OncoKB directly into OpenEvidence for use by providers outside of MSK. The organizations said that through this integration, OncoKB expert knowledge can now be paired with each patient’s clinical context to provide clinical decision support for the most complex oncology cases.

According to the announcement, OncoKB’s curated annotations for each cancer type, covering an alteration’s oncogenic effect, its level of evidence, and its associated therapies, will appear inside OpenEvidence and within Epic next to patient context. A clinician who asks about a specific alteration will see MSK’s expert assessment of its clinical actionability together with answers grounded in the peer-reviewed literature.

The organizations describe the collaboration as a flagship partnership launching what they call a first-of-its-kind oncology workflow, one that unites OncoKB with OpenEvidence’s EHR integration, patient-aware clinical intelligence, and medical AI to support MSK clinicians at the point of care.

OncoKB’s Curation Process and FDA Recognition

OncoKB is a precision oncology knowledge base developed at MSK that contains biological and clinical information about genomic alterations in cancer, per its official description. The knowledge base offers evidence-based assertions about whether a genetic alteration found in a patient’s cancer represents a clinically actionable biomarker that could inform subsequent treatment choices. A team of oncology and genetics experts curates the content, annotating each alteration’s oncogenic effect and its level of clinical actionability by drawing on FDA drug labels for oncology therapies, professional guidelines, and the scientific literature, and the curation process is documented in a version-controlled standard operating procedure.

The OncoKB Levels of Evidence system grades how clinically actionable each mutational event is, classifying therapeutic implications by alteration and tumor type. MSK states that these levels align with the joint consensus recommendation of the Association for Molecular Pathology, the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and the College of American Pathologists.

On October 7, 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted partial recognition status to a partial listing of OncoKB, which MSK described as the first database of somatic variants in cancer to be recognized in the agency’s Public Human Genetic Variant Databases. The recognition was specific to a section of OncoKB intended to support the development of next-generation sequencing tests, and a dedicated tab maps OncoKB levels of evidence to FDA levels of evidence as a source of clinical validity for test developers. At the time, the database contained clinical and biological information on more than 5,600 genomic changes in more than 680 cancer-associated genes.

The 2021 release stated that updates to the knowledge base are performed monthly, with priority given to new treatment-mutation associations resulting from FDA drug approvals, and that all new information is reviewed by an expert committee of MSK clinicians. At that time, OncoKB was being used to automatically annotate the sequencing reports of more than 12,000 patients per year whose tumors were analyzed by the FDA-cleared MSK-IMPACT test, and it was integrated into MSK clinical patient charts. OncoKB is freely available for academic research use and, per MSK’s licensing information, is offered to commercial entities on a non-exclusive basis.

Executive Statements and Platform Reach

“We’re excited that OpenEvidence will widen OncoKB’s reach, bringing MSK’s expert interpretation of a patient’s unique cancer genetics to cancer care providers across the U.S. to help them make molecularly informed treatment decisions,” said Debyani Chakravarty, lead scientist of OncoKB at MSK’s Kravis Center for Molecular Oncology. She said OncoKB is rooted in a mission to enable universal access to MSK’s expert interpretation of precision oncology data, which she described as particularly important now that molecular profiling is considered standard care for practically all cancers.

Anaeze Offodile, MSK’s chief strategy officer, said AI has the potential to fundamentally change how medicine converts a fast-growing and increasingly complex body of knowledge into better decisions for patients, and that realizing that potential requires thoughtful integration into how care is delivered. He said the work with OpenEvidence reflects MSK’s broader approach to AI: embedding trusted tools into clinical practice in ways that augment clinicians’ expertise, reduce friction, and support more informed, evidence-based care.

“OncoKB is the gold standard for making sense of a tumor’s genetics, built and maintained by the experts at MSK who have defined this field,” said Travis Zack, chief medical officer of OpenEvidence. He said that bringing the knowledge base into OpenEvidence, within the EHR and with patient context, lets a physician anywhere combine the primary literature with MSK-curated interpretation of which alterations matter and what to do about them.

Samyukta Mullangi, vice president of clinical strategy at OpenEvidence, said she trained at MSK and that the partnership will extend the reach of MSK’s genomic curation so that patients with cancer around the world can eventually have their next-generation sequencing data annotated with the same rigor.

OpenEvidence reports that more than half of U.S. hematologist-oncologists use the platform for their most complex oncology questions and that millions of verified U.S. healthcare professionals trust it when making high-stakes clinical decisions at the point of care. The company states that OpenEvidence is free for all verified U.S. clinicians.

MSK states that U.S. News & World Report has named it one of the top two cancer hospitals in the country for more than 30 years and that Newsweek’s World’s Best Specialized Hospitals 2026 list ranked it the best hospital in the world for oncology. Through the collaboration, the organizations said, every clinician on OpenEvidence gains access to OncoKB’s expert interpretation of cancer genomics, bringing MSK’s expertise to cancer care providers nationwide.