Genome-wide Association Studies of Cancer Predisposition

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have now been performed in nearly all common malignancies and have identified more than 100 common genetic risk variants that confer a modest increased risk of cancer. For most discovered germline risk variants, the per allele effect size is small (<1.5) and the biologic mechanism of the detected association remains unexplained. Exceptions are the risk variants identified in JAK2 in myeloproliferative neoplasm and in the KITLG gene in testicular cancer, which are each associated with nearly a 3-fold increased risk of disease. GWAS have provided an efficient approach to identifying common, low-penetrance risk variants, and have implicated several novel cancer susceptibility loci. However, the identified low-penetrance risk variants explain only a small fraction of the heritability of cancer and the clinical usefulness of using these variants for cancer-risk prediction is to date limited. Studies involving more heterogeneous populations, determination of the causal variants, and functional studies are now necessary to further elucidate the potential biologic and clinical significance of the observed associations.