alterlab-cosmic

alterlab-cosmic is a skill for Claude Code from AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills. It costs 117 tokens per session (2,391 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A programming interface to COSMIC, a catalogue of DNA changes found in human cancers. It includes cancer mutations, cancer-related gene lists, mutational patterns, structural changes, and gene fusions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to study cancer driver genes, recurrent mutations, drug-resistance changes, mutational signatures, copy-number changes, and gene fusions.
Why use it?
It brings curated cancer mutation information into a form that research programs can query and analyse. It helps avoid manually collecting mutation records from cancer studies.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the alterlab-databases plugin — 39 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to study cancer driver genes, recurrent mutations, drug-resistance changes, mutational signatures, copy-number changes, and gene fusions.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-cosmic
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills --skill alterlab-cosmic
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install alterlab-databases, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 39 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for alterlab-cosmic

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-cosmic/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-cosmic)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-cosmic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-cosmic/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for alterlab-cosmic

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-cosmic"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-cosmic.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 117 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,391 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00117 $0.02391
Opus 5 $0.00059 $0.01196
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00478
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00239

Measured 7d ago against content hash 602077bd350a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

alterlab-cosmic scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 7d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/download_cosmic.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

allowed-tools: Read WebFetch Bash(curl:*) Bash(python:*)
skills/databases/alterlab-cosmic/SKILL.md · 262 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 262 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

COSMIC Database

Overview

COSMIC (Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer) is the world's largest and most comprehensive database for exploring somatic mutations in human cancer. Access COSMIC's extensive collection of cancer genomics data, including millions of mutations across thousands of cancer types, curated gene lists, mutational signatures, and clinical annotations programmatically.

When to Use This Skill

This skill should be used when:

  • Downloading cancer mutation data from COSMIC
  • Accessing the Cancer Gene Census for curated cancer gene lists
  • Retrieving mutational signature profiles
  • Querying structural variants, copy number alterations, or gene fusions
  • Analyzing drug resistance mutations
  • Working with cancer cell line genomics data
  • Integrating cancer mutation data into bioinformatics pipelines
  • Researching specific genes or mutations in cancer contexts

Prerequisites

Account Registration

COSMIC requires authentication for data downloads:

Python Requirements

uv pip install requests pandas
# pysam is only needed if you read the VCF-format downloads
uv pip install pysam

Quick Start

1. Basic File Download

Use the scripts/download_cosmic.py script to download COSMIC data files:

from scripts.download_cosmic import download_cosmic_file

# Download mutation data
download_cosmic_file(
    email="[email protected]",
    password="your_password",
    filepath="GRCh38/cosmic/latest/CosmicMutantExport.tsv.gz",
    output_filename="cosmic_mutations.tsv.gz"
)

2. Command-Line Usage

# Download using shorthand data type
python scripts/download_cosmic.py [email protected] --data-type mutations

# Download specific file
python scripts/download_cosmic.py [email protected] \
    --filepath GRCh38/cosmic/latest/cancer_gene_census.csv

# Download for specific genome assembly
python scripts/download_cosmic.py [email protected] \
    --data-type gene_census --assembly GRCh37 -o cancer_genes.csv

Read the full file on GitHub · 262 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 7d ago First seen · 262 lines · 117 tokens per session scan A 602077bd350a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

alterlab-cosmic is a skill published in the GitHub repository AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills (66 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 117 tokens to every session and 2,391 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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