[7] By August 2009 it contained information from 1.5 million experiments performed, encompassing 13,423 genes in almost 370,000 tumours and describing over 90,000 mutations.

[8] COSMIC version 48, released in July 2010, incorporates mutation data from p53 in collaboration with the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

[9] In addition, it provided updated gene co-ordinates for the most recent human reference genome builds.

Data can be accessed via selection of a gene or cancer tissue type (phenotype), either using browse by features or the search box.

[8] For example, Campbell and colleagues used next generation sequencing to examine samples from two individuals with lung cancer which led to the identification of 103 somatic DNA rearrangements.