The ICGC-TCGA DREAM Genomic Mutation Calling Challenge (herein, The Challenge) is an international effort to improve standard methods for identifying cancer-associated mutations and rearrangements in whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data. Leaders of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) cancer genomics projects are joining with Sage Bionetworks and IBM-DREAM to initiate this innovative open crowd-sourced Challenge [1-3].

The goal of this somatic mutation calling (SMC) Challenge is to identify the most accurate mutation detection algorithms, and establish the state-of-the-art. The algorithms in this Challenge must use as input WGS data from tumour and normal samples and output mutation calls associated with cancer.