Metastatic breast cancerFLICKR, ED UTHMANTwo studies published today (October 23) document a slew of common genetic variants that correlate with an increased or decreased risk of developing breast cancer. For one study, published in Nature, researchers considered the genotypes of more than 100,000 breast cancer patients and a similar number of cancer-free controls at genetic loci across the genome and found 65 new genetic variants associated with cancer risk. The second study, published in Nature Genetics, used similar methods but only included patients with the rarer estrogen-receptor–negative breast cancers; this study identified 10 new variants, three of which overlapped with the first study. Researchers hope that these variants will help doctors to better predict a woman’s breast cancer risk based on her genome.
“Underlying cancer susceptibility is very complex and probably involves many, many dozens if not hundreds of underlying susceptibility alleles,” says Timothy Rebbeck, an epidemiologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who was not involved in the work. “[This work] validates some of the variants that had been identified previously, and it also identifies new ones. . . . Ideally, we can use that information to predict who’s at risk of developing a breast cancer.”
In addition, the new findings could shed light on the underlying biology of breast cancer, Rebbeck says. “The variants that are identified identify genes and pathways and biological mechanisms that allow us to understand how breast cancers arise.”
Breast cancers fall into one ...
